Fever Crumb (24 page)

"I don't think so," said Wavey.

"We cannot," said Quercus, very firmly, sounding like a soldier for the first time. Fever saw his shiny boots approach across the oak-planked deck, "if this is true, Miss Crumb, then we need the knowledge that you carry. My gods! All Godshawk's genius at our disposal. You're a greater treasure than any in that vault."

Fever looked sharply at him.

"Oh, yes, Miss Crumb. We know about the vault."

"From Dr. Stayling?" she asked.

The northerner shook his head. "I have not told Stayling of it. We could not risk having your Order of Engineers helping themselves to its contents. No, it was your mother who told me of it, many years ago. Back then, we had no reason to believe it still existed; we assumed that it had been looted or destroyed during your Skinners' Riots. Then one of my agents, the woman you know as Mistress Gloomstove, became aware of Master Solent's activities. That is what convinced me to advance on London."

Fever blinked. It felt strange, having to recast Mistress Gloomstove as a Movement spy, but stranger things had happened that day. She said, "What's in the vault anyway?"

Wavey did not answer her, but looked instead at Nikola Quercus.

"More Stalker stuff?" Fever prompted. "More things like this one inside me?"

"No, no," said Wavey. "Godshawk had given up that project long before you were born. He was working on something else. That statue he began to build was just a cover, an excuse to start constructing great factory sheds and importing tons of steel and raw materials. He was afraid that if he told people what he was
really
planning they would think it madness."

"What -- madder than a mile-high statue of himself?" asked Fever.

Wavey ignored her, smiling shyly toward Quercus. "After I left you at Unthank's dig, Fever, I wandered for years, all through the Minarchies and up into the nomad empires, earning my living as a traveling technomancer. I never spoke to anyone of what I was, and who my father had been. I never hoped to return to London. But when I came aboard this castle and met Quercus, I saw at once that here was a man who could appreciate Godshawk's vision. I told him about the vault and what it contained, and he decided that the Movement must have it."

Again her mother looked at Quercus, and Fever realized that she was waiting for him to decide whether they should share the secret of the vault with Fever.

"What is it?" she said. She thought of those loose pencil sketches of cogs and heat exchangers in the notebook on Kit Solent's library table, and dim memories of imaginary machines woke and whirred in her mind, but there was nothing that she could make sense of. "What was Godshawk working on? What is in the vault?"

Behind her, softly, Nikola Quercus said, "The future."

***

Down on the under-decks of the fortress, preparations were under way for the final assault on London. The technomancers who guarded the mysteries of its engines went about their work, opening the fuel cocks, oiling the pistons, coaxing the aged machinery into noisy motion, chanting prayers and incantations to keep it running. And at the same time, gangs of slaves from the barrack barges were marched aboard the fortress to take their places in the giant wooden drums that flanked the engine rooms. When forty men were shackled in each drum they, too, became engines of a kind; the energy they generated as they tramped endlessly along the rolling inner surface of their treadmills was transferred by means of cogs and camshafts to the drive wheels.

Slowly, as the lower decks filled with the smells of engine fumes and slave sweat, the fortress began to move. Barrel-shaped wheels, studded to grip the snows of the northern frost barrens, coped easily with the mud and scrub of Hampster's Heath. By the light of the rising moon it pushed its blunt prow through the Orbital Moatway, and from its funnels came a shrill, triumphant,
woot
! as, with its escort of armored barges spread out like wings on either side of it, it began to roll toward the lights of London.

***

They let Fever have a little narrow cabin, and she lay down on the cot in the corner of it and tried to sleep. But how could she sleep, with the whole place shuddering and her mind a stew of someone else's memories? There seemed to be more of them every minute, and she was starting to be afraid that if they kept multiplying there would soon be no room left for her inside her own head, if the decisions she made about the future weren't based on her own experience but on Godshawk's, mightn't she start to behave more and more like him? Perhaps her own personality would fade completely, and she would be nothing but Godshawk's avatar; the evil old man reborn in a new body.

She climbed off the cot, which was really more like a padded shelf, space being precious in a traction fortress. She had not bothered to take off her trousers or shirt when she lay down. Quickly she pulled on her boots and the coat that Wavey Godshawk had brought to replace her own bloodstained, mud-stained one. It was a Movement woman's coat, cut long and slender out of red silk with a deeper red snowflake pattern and a fox-fur collar. Part of Fever thought it most irrational, but another part, the Godshawk part, thought she looked the bee's knees as she left the cabin.

There was a scent of smoke and metal in the cramped corridors. Movement warriors hurried to and fro, holding on to the handrails on the wall each time the fortress juddered over some obstacle. They stared at Fever as she passed, but none tried to stop or question her -- she was the Land Admiral's guest, after all. She took a few wrong turnings, confused by the many passageways and sublevels, but she found her way at last to the big chamber where she had first met Quercus. He was there again, sitting in his big chair, listening to a report which one of his captains was shouting at him above the steady clangor of the fortress's progress. He had put on a coat of mail over his tunic, and there was steel armor on his neck and forearms. The other people in the chamber were all soldiers, armed and armored; the women had been banished below.

Quercus looked round and saw Fever standing there. "Miss Crumb," he said. "You should not be here." He spoke politely, but in a way that made it plain that he did not expect her to argue. "It may get dangerous as we approach the city. There is trouble in London and our agents there are no longer sure who is in charge. There may be resistance, and you are too important to risk." He rose from his seat and came closer, looking curiously at Fever's face. "It will be one thing to capture Godshawk's invention, but quite another to make it work, and build replicas, and do all the thousand things that must be done, if you really have the old man's thoughts inside you, you will be invaluable. It will be like having Godshawk himself there to help us."

"You still haven't told me what is in the vault," said Fever. "What has my mother promised you, that made it worth bringing your castle all this way?"

Quercus laughed. "Look inside yourself, Miss Crumb. Search among the old man's memories!" Then he glanced past her and snapped his fingers. "Captain Andringa!" he shouted.

A young warrior came hurrying to take Fever by the arm and escort her out of the command chamber. He was polite and respectful, but firm. "No women, no girls, not here, not when we are going into action. It is bad luck!"

"Is there going to be more fighting?" asked Fever.

"We hope not, but your people may have placed some artillery pieces among their northern suburbs. Don't worry. Our big guns can knock out their batteries before they do us any damage. May I help you back to your cabin?"

"Where is my mother?" asked Fever, who didn't want to be alone if there was to be a battle.

"The Snow Leopard?" He looked wary. "She is at work. In the Resurrectory."

"Where's that?"

The young man was doubtful. He looked back at the door of the command chamber as if he was thinking of asking permission from his Land Admiral. But Quercus had a battle to direct. He shrugged, and took Fever's arm again. "Come. I'll take you."

***

The Resurrectory was deep in the castle's rumbling innards, down among the engines and the straining slaves. Fever, recalling that her mother was a technomancer and that the nomads thought of technology as magic or a gift from the gods, imagined that it would be some sort of temple. When her guide showed her in through its heavy doors she saw at once that she'd been quite wrong.

It was a place of science. Science of a sort. The sort of science that felt almost like magic even to an Engineer; stuff that no one understood, but which stubbornly went on working anyway. A 'lectric lamp swung from the center of the low roof, lighting up a bench where Wavey Godshawk and two red-robed assistants bent over a dead man, turning him patiently and carefully into another Stalker for the Movement's army.

Wavey turned from her work as her daughter came in. She pushed up the brass goggles that she wore and smiled, as if there were no corpse lying on the zinc-topped slab in front of her. But there was, and because it was not yet fully sheathed in its Stalker armor, Fever could see that it was the corpse of Kit Solent.

She put a hand to her mouth, and backed against the door, which the man who led her there had closed behind him as he left. Her Engineer upbringing had never been so tested. Her reason told her that Kit Solent was dead, and that it did not matter what happened to his remains. Her instincts all screamed at her that it was wrong, wrong, wrong to strip and mutilate him like that, and fill the hollow of his chest with whatever those weird, gleaming devices were, to fit those flashlights in the craters where his eyes had been.

"Fever!" said Wavey, pulling off soiled rubber gloves as she came round the worktable to greet her daughter. "Are you all right? You look quite pale. Don't be afraid. Quercus has fought ever so many battles, and always brings us safely through."

Fever could not stop staring at what was left of Kit. Plastic tubes led from his veins, pumping out blood, pumping in chemicals. The robed assistants were busy fitting clumsy-looking metal hands to the armor that encased his arms. His real hands, discarded, stuck out of a soggy basket on the deck, looking pale and stupid and unreal.

"Quercus said he would be treated with honor," she said, in a tiny voice.

"But this is an honor, Fever, according to the customs of the Movement," replied her mother. "Only the best fighters are reborn as Stalkers, so that their bodies may go on serving the Movement even after their souls have gone to the High Halls. It is a privilege extended to very few enemies. Your Master Solent was a brave man, and this is Quercus's way of acknowledging that bravery." She put a comforting arm around Fever's shoulders, but Fever shrugged it off. She hated being touched, and she didn't want comfort. She had done quite well without a mother for fourteen years; why did Wavey think that she suddenly needed so much stroking and hugging?

She mastered her feeling of nausea and stepped closer to the horrid table. She saw that the machines that had been packed into Kit's torso were already old; Ancient technology recycled down the centuries in Stalker after Stalker, just as she and Dr. Crumb had recycled the New Council's stock of brains and claws and eyes into generations of paper boys. In some ways, she supposed, this was a fitting end for an archaeologist. "I didn't know you did this," she said thinly.

"How do you think I managed to become Quercus's technomancer in the first placer" asked Wavey. "I spent so long assisting Godshawk that I can build Stalkers in my sleep. Though not for much longer, I fear. Our supplies of Stalker brains are running out, and the art of making new ones is long lost. That makes it even grander, in a way, that Quercus has ordered your friend to be Resurrected. The new brain in Master Solent's head is the best we have in stock, brought from a Snowmad trader who found it high, high upon the northern ice. I think you really impressed him, Fever; Quercus, I mean. I'm sure he likes you. We really
must
try and do something with your hair...."

"But will he remember anything?" asked Fever.

"Quercus?"

"No, Master Solent!"

"Nothing," Wavey promised her. "Your friend is dead. This new warrior we are building will not be Master Solent at all, but a Stalker, implacable and undying."

"What power source keeps all those devices running inside him? How is he fueled?"

"No fuel is required."

"But that would break the laws of thermodynamics...."

"Oh, you Engineers and your laws," said her mother. "They work, Fever. What does it matter how? They draw the power they need from the environment somehow. Godshawk called it 'Molecular Clockwork,' but even he could not discover how it was done. Yet the Stalkers go on. Your friend Solent may still be stalking around long after you and I and the Movement are forgotten."

Fever stood with her and watched while Kit's chest was closed, and a plate of armor fitted over the dead flesh. The red-robed mechanics then set to work upon his helmet, attaching a complicated sliding visor arrangement to the metal skull-piece that now sheathed his head. They had just finished stencilling his new name on it when the body began to stir, making small restless movements with its feet and fingers. A green light flared up in its eyes. The mechanics drew back.

"What is happening?" asked Fever.

Wavey drew her carefully away from the creature. "It is quickening. The Stalker brain is taking control of its new body. It is ...

With a hard clang, sharp, steel-blue blades extended from the Stalker's hands. It began to thrash its arms about. Its mouth opened and a terrible, deep, wordless cry came from it. One of the mechanics ran to a red locker on the wall and took out a clumsy-looking gun with a thick copper disc in place of a muzzle. He trained the weapon on the new Stalker's head and looked up at Wavey, waiting for her order.