Fever Crumb (27 page)

"That's not what I intended!" said Fever, Godshawkishly. And then, more like herself, 'That's irrational! It's deranged!"

Her mother made a pretty, dismissive movement with one long white hand in the lantern light. "I suppose it's a nomad thing. Who cares? By telling Quercus about Godshawk's plans and Godshawk's engines I made him the instrument of my revenge. Thanks to him, London will be humbled; its streets will be torn down to provide raw materials, its people will be forced to toil at building Godshawk's dream. A thousand years from now the Scriven will be forgotten, but the world will still remember Auric Godshawk, the man who set a city moving!"

It seemed to Fever much more likely that it would be Quercus who got the credit, should the unlikely scheme succeed. But she did not say so, and Wavey, after smiling fiercely at her for a moment, turned and walked on. Fever and the Stalkers went with her. And perhaps because she now knew each twist and dip of the way so well, or perhaps because she was so taken up with Godshawk's salvaged memories that she was not aware of much else, it seemed to Fever only a little time before the passage widened into the antechamber where the vault door waited.

The Stalkers' green eyes swept the walls of the antechamber, and their beam came to rest on the other door, the door with the ivory handle, which led to the upper world.

It was open. And when Wavey went and opened it still wider and looked up the long throat of the stairway there was a dim hint of daylight high above which told them that the outer door was open, too. Fever supposed that she and Kit had forgotten to shut them when they came back inside after Creech was shot. That had been less than twenty-four hours ago, but so much had happened since then that the memory felt more ancient than one of Godshawk's.

Wavey returned to the vault door. She lifted her lantern again. Fever looked at the lock. For a moment she was afraid that all her misfortunes would have driven the number that opened it out of her head, but she just had to stop thinking for a second and it was there. She closed her eyes and carefully pressed each key in turn, watching Auric Godshawk's old speckled fingers type out the sequence. 2519364085.

The lock ticked. The door gave a little shiver, like something waking itself from sleep. Fever heard her mother make a soft sound, deep in her throat, almost a purr. Then the door slid swiftly up into the roof. Behind it was another, but that was already sliding to the right, and behind that was a third that went left.

And behind that, darkness, and faint shifting shards of lantern light bouncing back from dusty metal surfaces.

Wavey took out a pencil and a note tablet and carefully wrote down the code while her Stalkers dragged Kit's heavy toolbox halfway across the doorsill and left it there to stop the door from closing behind them. Wavey had loved her father, but she did not trust him, and Fever, knowing how the old man's mind had worked, knew that it would have been just like him to install some trap or trick that would slam the doors behind them and leave them both entombed.

They picked up their lanterns and stepped across the threshold, cautious and curious as a pair of cats.

***

Roaring with the rage of the fight, Ted slammed his fists and knees against Quercus's thinner, fitter body, driving him backward. Quercus fought back, landing a blow on Ted's right ear that jarred his skull and sent pain spiking through his head. He grabbed Quercus's hand, his shoulder, brought his head down like a hammer on the younger man's face. Quercus started to fall, but Ted grabbed him by his belt and hair and flung him bodily down in the shadow of the mighty keg.

"Swiney!" roared the crowd, the voice of London drowning out the shouts of the nomads.

Ted looked at him lying there, between the trestles that held the fat barrel up. The cobbles all round it were puddled with the beer that last night's revellers had spilled. The fumes alone were probably enough to set Quercus's head reeling. He would go to meet his gods stinking like a barroom rug.

Ted lifted his swollen, bloodied head and nodded at Mutt and Brickie, up on the trestles. And Mutt and Brickie, just as he'd told them to, kicked hard against the chocks they'd driven in between the trestle and the keg while everyone was watching the fight, and jumped clear.

Except, like the stupid, drunken cloots they were, they didn't do it quite at the same time, the way Ted had told them. Instead of coming down square and mashing Quercus like a cockroach, one end of the barrel smashed down before the other, missing him by inches. The nomad squirmed swiftly backward, shouting something furious and foreign at Ted.

That was Ted's last sight of him. A half second later the other end of the barrel came down, hiding him from sight. Beer spurted between the staves, but the hoops held it in shape, and the slight camber of the square set it rolling, and its own huge weight kept it coming, straight toward Ted.

"Oh, Cheesers
Crice
," he said, not scared, just furious at the never-ending uselessness of Mutt and Brickie. He eyed the barrel sullenly as it rumbled toward him, taller than three men, beer sloshing about inside and the old anvil he'd added for flavoring going dunk, dunk, dunk in there somewhere like the clapper of a wooden bell. Ted waited till it was close before he stepped sideways out of its path with that surprising, prizefighter's grace that he'd used in the old days to dodge charging Stalkers and mounted gladiators.

Only in the ring at Pickled Eel Circus there had always been sawdust to stand on, not smooth cobbles slippery with spilled beer. His heel came down in a puddle of Brimstone Best, and slid from under him. He fell heavily, and before he could rise, the barrel with its heavy planks and thick iron hoops was upon him.

It looked, as it came down on him, rather like a huge wheel.

There was a thick crunch, and a sudden silence in the square. The barrel rolled on, drawing a long red stripe across the pavement until it came to a gentle stop against the water trough. Men were running forward to help
Quercus
to his feet. Mutt and Brickie and a few other London lads hurried to where Ted lay, but they'd have needed spatulas to get him off the cobbles. The barrel had ironed him as flat as a paper boy.

The silence lasted just a heartbeat more. Then everyone was shouting again. "
Quercus!
Quercus
!" they chanted, as the battered nomad hobbled up the steps, turning at the top to raise both fists in victory. And it wasn't just the men he'd brought with him who were cheering him. Because, say what you will about Londoners, they enjoyed a good, fair fight, and they had always loved a winner.

***

A low, unwindowed room, ribbed with stone buttresses. Brass lamps shaped like lilies hanging from the roof, if you ignored the dust, the vault had the look of a place only lately abandoned. Piles of papers lay waiting to be filed on shelves. A cup stood on a desk, and when Fever peered into it she saw the brown, crystallized dregs of Godshawk's morning coffee.

Tall figures stood in a rank along the farthest wall, and seemed to move when she lifted her lantern to look at them. Corvus, Lammergeier, and Grike all bared their claws while Wavey instantly darted a hand into her bag and brought it out clutching that clumsy gun, the magneto pistol from the Resurrectory. But it was only shadows that had moved; thick, solid-seeming shadows that swung through the dusty air as the lanterns shifted. The Stalkers that stood against the wall were old and lightless-eyed and they wore veils and trains of dusty cobwebs like a row of jilted brides. A few were without their heads. Dimly, from the back of Fever's memory, their names came wafting.
Salvage. Rusty. Clockwork Joe
.

"There's another chamber," she said. "And then another beyond that ..."

They moved toward the dead Stalkers. There was a narrow door in the wall behind them. They wove a path to it between the spiky, silent figures, and Wavey kept her strange gun ready.

Corvus shoved open the door and pushed through it into a second chamber, identical in size and shape to the first. Fever, Wavey, and the other Stalkers went after him. These rooms were hexagonal, fitted together like the cells of a honeycomb. In this one were shelves of strange old medical devices, and a slab just like the one on which Kit Solent had been remade as Grike. Fever remembered being Godshawk, standing at that slab to fumble in the brains of the living and the dead. She remembered the sharp, off-white smell of the chemicals, the deep copper tang of blood. She did not remember the little cot that her torch revealed-in the shadows behind it. Here, in this room, she, too, had been remade.

She let her light go wandering over the rows of vials and syringes, the ranked bottles with their dusty, unreadable labels, the cobwebbed trays of catlins and retractors. How hard and patiently the old man must have worked down here to save his tiny granddaughter! And for the first time it occurred to her that perhaps he had not simply done it out of a desire to fill her head with his own thoughts and memories. Perhaps Godshawk's consciousness was not inside her after all. Maybe he had failed to transfer more than a few fragments of himself into those old Stalker brains he'd brought back from the north. And maybe he had known he'd failed. When he put that machine in baby Fever's brain it might not have been an attempt to preserve his own personality. It might have been just a last, desperate effort to save his daughter's child. An old man, alone with a dying baby, grabbing up an abandoned experiment and thinking,
let's see if this
does
any good....

Perhaps he realized, there at the end, that immortality wasn't won by designing engines, or building sky-high statues, or stuffing your thoughts into other heads, but just by keeping your children and their children safe, so that they could carry something of you on into the future. Not your opinions, or your silly memories of pools and parties and kissing people in parks, but the deeper memories, written in your genes; the shape of a nose, the curve of an eyebrow, the little habits and mannerisms which endure through families, through history.

Perhaps he hadn't even known, when he placed that device in baby Fever's brain, that it contained anything of himself at all. And Fever, standing in his workroom now, felt for the first time a sort of affection for him, and a sort of gratitude.

She looked up. Grike stood nearby, the green light from his eyes flickering as he studied the slab where Godshawk had tinkered with his Stalkers. Was he remembering his own creation, in Wavey's Resurrectory? Or was some deeper feeling stirring in him? Fever watched uneasily as his bared claws flinched. Told herself not to be silly.
He's not Kit
Solent. He's just a machine now....

Wavey, meanwhile, had crossed the room along with Corvus and Lammergeier and thrown open another door. "Fever!" she said excitedly. "Come and look! Wait till Quercus sees
this?'

But as Fever started to move toward the doorway, the Stalker Grike barred her way.

" what am i ?" he asked.

She hadn't heard him speak before. He had the same flat, awful voice as the other Stalkers, nothing at all like Kit Solent's. The bladed hand he raised in front of her was trembling. " who am i? what has been done to me?"

"I don't ... I don't ... said Fever, not knowing what to say.

But before she could say anything, Grike's fellow Stalkers had reacted. She saw their heads whip round at the sound of his voice, visors down and green light flaring through the eye-slits. In the Lazarus Brigade it sometimes happened that a battle-damaged Stalker would go mad, lashing out at his comrades, even claiming to remember his mortal life. They knew what had to be done. They turned toward Grike, and the crash of armor against armor echoed from the low roof. Fever threw herself sideways as Grike stepped back out of the way of Corvus's blades. Whatever had gone wrong inside his Stalker's brain, it had not slowed or weakened him. He recovered in an instant, slammed Corvus's second blow aside, and drove his own blades through the other Stalker's armor, deep into the organs and machinery beneath. There were sparks and a glittering spray of fluids. Corvus gave a grating roar, and Grike drew back and struck again. Corvus fell sideways, spewing smoke and a smell of burned wiring, the green glow of his eyes going out. Lammergeier circled warily just beyond the reach of Grike's talons. In the doorway of the inner chamber Wavey Godshawk appeared, the magneto pistol in her hands.

"Something's gone wrong with him!" Fever screamed. "Stop him!"

Her mother raised the pistol, pointing it at Grike's head. Grike lunged forward, seizing Lammergeier by his armored
wrists.
The vault was too small a space for such large creatures to fight in. An upended shelf spilled laboratory glassware; a cabinet was kicked into splinters. Grike twisted Lammergeier sideways, shielding himself with the other Stalker's body as Wavey pulled the pistol's trigger. The pistol made a thin whining sound, almost lost in the clash and scuffle of the struggling Stalkers. Lammergeier, caught by its blast, went rigid, juddering. Grike levered his head off, shoved the body aside and strode toward the door, where Wavey stood fumbling with the magneto pistol.

"Wavey!" screamed Fever.

She saw Wavey look up, and watched her realize that she had no time to recharge the pistol. Her face was a ghastly green in the light from the Stalker's eyes. He smashed her aside, looked through the doorway into the far room, then turned back. The beams of his eyes swept past Fever, but he was not interested in her. He looked again at Godshawk's cobwebby equipment, then turned and went striding from the chamber. Fever heard him go crashing through the first room, blundering out into the antechamber. Heard his heavy footfalls go stamping up the stairs and into silence.

For a moment she felt too frightened to move, but she shut her eyes tight and repeated the Laws of Motion until she felt stronger. Then she picked up her lantern and stepped over the wreckage of Lammergeier and Corvus to the inner door.