Scrivener's Moon (24 page)

But Andringa had no reserves, and when one of his landships was captured or destroyed it left a gap in his line, while the ships his enemies lost were replaced by others pushing in from the north. Nor could the Londoner’s armour protect them from the northern Stalkers, which climbed in through their gun-ports to slaughter their crews, while from the gun-ports of some Arkhangelsk ships long whips of lightning struck down their own Stalkers, crackling like frost as they wrapped around the iron men. And some of the ships in the northern line were Raven’s, as fast and strong as anything from London, and when one of those rolled forward a long, terrible duel began, with no predicting which ship would win.

In mid-afternoon, with the sun glaring through the smoke like a red-hot penny, the line broke and the remnants of the London fleet came crawling backwards to Three Dry Ships, the surviving infantry and Stalkers running between them.

“That’s it,” said Borglum. He started to shoo his people away from the old ship’s side, herding them towards the stair-head. “Come on. Show’s over. We got to get ourselves aboard one of those things and pray it’s faster than anything the Arkies have got.”

“Are they running?” asked Fever, running herself as she followed him down the stairs again.

“All the way to the sea, if they’ve got any sense,” said Lady Midnight, coming down behind.

But Andringa and his men must have had no sense at all, or else they thought there was no point in running from the Arkhangelsk. As the misshapes neared the bottom of the stairs they found themselves shouldered aside by soldiers coming up; soldiers with blackened faces and wide, shocked eyes, Bugharins in their hands and a reek of powder-smoke about them. Lucy shrieked, imagining that they were Arkhangelsk, but they were Andringa’s men, come to make a stand in Three Dry Ships. Outside, as Borglum led his people through the miserable streets and up the hill, men were everywhere, dragging barricades across the gaps between sheds and cottages, setting up a demi-cannon on a tripod. The reversing landships scrabbled up the hill and into positions on its terraces. None went further than halfway up, or showed any sign of running back to London, let alone carrying hitchhikers when it went.

“What now then?” asked Master Fenster.

“Keep going,” said Borglum. “We can at least get this hill between us and whatever unpleasantness happens here. . .”

War horns were sounding as Fever and the others followed him uphill between the waiting ships. The slope was steep, and after the first thirty feet she stopped and paused for breath and looked back, just in time to see the northerners’ vanguard break from the smoke. Arkhangelsk infantry were milling between the oncoming vehicles, and dozens fell as the men who’d stationed themselves in Three Dry Ships opened fire. The landships on the hillside around her began to fire too. The Arkhangelsk ships faltered. Already a couple were in flames, but the northern foot-warriors kept coming, hard men in mail and wolfskin, much like the Morvishmen she’d met, fearless and keen for glory. Their battle cries rose above the noise of guns and engines as they charged into the little town, piling through windows and shot-holes into the old hulk where Fever and her friends had sheltered. Others swung past the town and started up the hill, driving Andringa’s men before them, letting off arquebuses and crossbows as they came. Master Fenster, running ahead of her, suddenly turned round and dropped his gun and fell. Fever tripped over him and someone stumbled over her, and a shell bursting further up the slope blinded her with its spray of dirt. By the time she crawled back to where Master Fenster lay he was dead.

She looked for Borglum and the others. There was only smoke, and the gaudy leaping light of a burning landship a little way off along the hill. Half the hillside seemed to have been blown into the sky and was pattering down in pieces all around. From below came the shouting voices of the warriors. She scrambled up and started running blindly, tripping on dead men and scattered packs. It sounded as if the sea was finally returning to Three Dry Ships; roaring down from the north in a storm-wave like the one that had once swamped Thursday Island and orphaned Arlo.

Someone grabbed her, but it was only Quatch, dragging her down into the doubtful shelter of a barricade made from empty crates and a broken door. Borglum crouched there too, and Lady Midnight. The dwarf said, “You want ter watch yourself, scamperin’ about in that Arkie coat; one of our brave boys’ll put a bullet in you.”

“Where are the others?’ she asked.

“Dunno,” said Borglum. He was loading a Bugharin he’d found somewhere, glaring out over the barricade into the smoke. “Everybody’s runnin’ this way and that. It’s all gone pear-shaped.”

“Master Fenster’s dead,” she said.

“Stalkers!” someone shouted, further down the hill.

Out of the drifts of smoke below they came, ghostly at first and then suddenly solid. A glint of gunlight on raised blades; the beams of green eyes slicing the smoke. The cry went up all along the London lines: “Stalkers!” A fortress a little way downhill was overrun, the Stalkers swarming over it like ants, men leaping from upper decks to escape them. From somewhere to the left a squad of Andringa’s Stalkers came hurrying slantwise across the slope of the hill. Battle-strimmers revved and snarled and for a moment it seemed they would drive their rivals back, but the mortal warriors of the north poured past them, leaving the Stalkers to fight each other. Through a tear in the smoke Fever glimpsed what looked like mossy boulders moving, and before she could say anything the mammoths were upon them.

These were not amiable mammoths like Carpet and Lump; these had been bred for size and fierceness, and armoured so heavily that they looked more like machines than animals. On their trunks and forelegs were long segmented sleeves of iron, rivets winking in the firelight. Their heads were hidden in spiked guards, their wayward tusks were tipped with sharpened steel, and they were half mad with terror and fury. Swinging their big heads from side to side they crashed through the knots of defenders, crushing anyone who stood before them, snatching up in their trunks those who tried to flee and flinging them away into the smoke.

“Borglum!” Fever shouted. “We have to run!”

“Run from them hairy bloggers?” Borglum shouted back. “Not likely. If they’re chucking mammoths at us then Andringa’s lads must really have mucked up their landships. We’ll win this yet.” He raised his gun, taking aim at the biggest mammoth he could see, a monster of a mammoth that had just appeared out of the smoke, galloping westward along the face of the hill. In its howdah a red mammoth skull had been mounted on a tall staff, fluttering with pennants. A Stalker stood there, and two armoured Arkhangelsk, and a man who waved his thin arms high above his silly hat, and another figure, slighter, all in white, with a cloud of rusty hair blown back. . .

Fever shoved Borglum’s rifle sideways just as it went off.

“What are you playing at, Fever Crumb?” he asked, reaching for a fresh bullet. “Whose side you on?”

“I know her, that girl,” said Fever. “That’s Cluny Morvish.” Even there, in that awful place, it felt good just to be saying Cluny’s name.

“That’s right,” Borglum said, more gently. “You’re fond of her.”

Fever nodded, and for a moment, as their eyes met, she thought he understood. Then something hummed past her like a hornet and punched him backwards. “Borglum! Borglum!” Lady Midnight shouted as he fell against her. A mammoth – not Cluny’s but another, still larger – was thundering up the slope towards their barricade, and men its howdah were firing guns down at them as it came. Without thinking, Fever reached for the rifle which Borglum had dropped. Without thinking, she pulled the bolt back, raised it to her shoulder, stood to take a better aim. As long as she didn’t think, her body knew exactly what to do; Godshawk had hunted mammoths and fought in battles of his own, and his memories were in her muscles and her nerves. She let him take charge for a moment as she squinted through the rifle’s sights, ignoring Quatch bellowing at her to get down, ignoring Lady Midnight’s wails of “Borglum!”

There was a little eyehole in the mammoth’s armour, with a little, bright, mad eye glinting out. Fever squeezed the trigger carefully and put a bullet through it, and felt an elation that was not her own as the beast reared up screaming, flailing at the air with its spiked forelegs, its hind feet trampling the marksmen who tumbled from its back.
I must make sure to get its tusks
, she thought, watching it crash down.
What a trophy they will make!
The thought was Godshawk’s, not her own, so she stuffed it down into the cellar of her mind and shut a door upon it and ran to where Lady Midnight cradled Borglum. He was shuddering, shuddering, but when he saw Fever bend over him he went still, smiled, said, “Duchess? That you? They told me you was. . .”

“Oh, Master Borglum,” she said, kneeling down beside him, but he was not there any more, and Lady Midnight, weeping, laid him down and said, “We must leave. . .”

Light broke over them. An Arkhangelsk war-lamp was raking its beam through the smoke to dazzle the defenders and show the attackers what they were attacking. Out of the light came Stalkers, looking like black spiky cut-outs with their edges all nibbled away by the glare. Fever felt their green gaze brush her face as Lady Midnight caught her by one arm and pulled her away. “Come on, dearest, we must go now, or join poor Borglum in the Sunless Country. . .”

A Stalker kicked through the barricade. Quatch turned back to meet it; grabbed it by its metal face and wrenched its head off in a spray of nasty fluids. Its flailing body twisted free and killed him with a random swipe of its claws, dropping him on top of Borglum while Fever and Lady Midnight scurried up the hill. The neat lines of the battle had all gone now; there was fighting everywhere they looked: mammoths, landships, Stalkers, warriors, Andringa’s soldiers, an unexploded shell bounding downhill like a barrel. There was a steady roaring sound, no longer the noise of individual guns, just one long, dreadful din.

“Now you must guide me, Fever, dear,” shouted Lady Midnight. “This ain’t no Carnival of Knives and my eyes ain’t much good to me with all these fires and such to dazzle them.”

So Fever took her hand and they went together between blazing landships, past London Stalkers who had been re-killed and stood burning like man-shaped braziers. They reached the summit, but as they started down the far side they found battle in front of them too. Northerners had got round behind the hill somehow, moving on foot in small and silent groups between the thorn-bushes while the defenders were all busy with the main assault. A huge Suomi cut down a London officer just ahead of Fever and then turned to lunge at her, but there were no fires behind him, so he showed up bright to Lady Midnight, who found a dagger in her belt and flung it into his throat. He fell with a gurgle, and as they went past him they saw that the man he’d left on the ground was Captain Andringa, struggling to rise while a widening red stain soaked through his tunic. Lady Midnight stopped and heaved him up; swung him over her shoulders and went on stooped beneath his weight, ignoring his commands to go on and save herself. “He’s such a nice captain,” she said to Fever. “We can’t just leave him here to die or be lost.” She was determined to save someone from the battle, even if all her friends were gone.

“You can’t carry him all the way to London,” Fever warned. Carnival fighter or not, the big woman was already straining beneath Andringa’s weight, but she just gritted her teeth and went on down the hill, and as Fever went after her the smoke around them flared golden, for the afternoon sun had dipped below the edge of the pall that hung above the battlefield, and its light glittered on the bogs and culverts of the southward plains.

They pressed on, while men ran past them, throwing away packs and rifles as they went, fleeing before the northerners’ advance. From behind came the hoarse trumpeting of mammoths, the clang of Suomi war-bells, the ramshackle clatter of the northern landships heaving themselves to the hill’s crest, shunting aside the ships which had stood so long against them. Lady Midnight panted, stumbling; Andringa groaned and bled; Fever wondered uselessly if there was some way they could share his weight. The light grew, and the smoke thinned, and the mist of evening hung above the drainage ditches and the brown, autumnal fields, and there, beyond the fields, above the mist. . .

What was
that
thing? What
was
it?

Other fugitives nearby had seen it too; Fever could tell by the way their heads went back, and the wonder that woke in their weary faces as they looked up and up. And she realized that the thunderous low growl she had been hearing for some minutes now was not the noise of the battle behind her but was coming from that monstrous shape as it tore its way out of the fog-banks in the south.

It was the sound of engines.

London had arrived.

ondon had arrived. Through a night and a day it had clawed its way northward, while the people huddled on its deck plates and the Engineers who controlled it slowly grew used to the idea that their city moved. Its speed on that first journey averaged just under ten miles per hour. It shed its tracks with maddening regularity, and several times an engine failed, but the city just halted to make repairs and then rolled on its way again, grinding the New North Road to grit beneath it. Behind the fog and the drifting smoke of battle, nobody at Three Dry Ships had noticed its approach. Through all the thunder of the guns, no one had heard it.
The Future
, Quercus would say later,
is something that sneaks up on us while we are busy doing other things
.

Fever let her eyes rove over it, finding familiar structures beneath the ugly new fortifications. There was the stairway they called Cat’s Creep, rising up the central axis through the unfinished tiers. There was the platform where she’d stood with Dr Crumb on the day she first went aboard. . .

“What is it?” asked Lady Midnight, gazing at it with her white eyes. “It’s
hot
. . .”

“It’s come a long way,” said Fever. “It’s London.”

“See?” said the carnival woman, reaching up to pat Captain Andringa. “I told you we’d get you there.”

Behind them, northern forts and battlewagons coming over the crest of Dryships Hill slowed in confusion as their crews made out the thing that waited for them. Fever imagined them frantically checking their charts, trying to identify this misplaced mountain.
People aren’t used to this
, she thought. Even she, she discovered, had never
really
believed that London could move: her head had grasped it, but her heart had not. Yet here it was, and although she understood the principles by which its wheels turned and its engines worked, she was as astonished by it as everyone else.
None of us is used to geography that moves
. . .

But they would have to get used to it, because here it was, a hundred miles from its birthplace and moving still, rolling carefully and cautiously towards her. Its bows broke free of the drifting mist. The serrated doors of the Great Under Tier looked so like the snout of a hungry dragon that she remembered Cluny and thought,
This is Cluny’s vision. This is Godshawk’s dream, made real
.

The northern landships on the hilltop began to fire. Fever ducked instinctively, but the shots were pitched high over her head, tearing splinters from the palisades that ringed each of London’s tiers. At once, big guns aboard the city started to reply: ship’s guns, whose shells fell thick among the clustered vehicles on the ridge. Some were mounted so high on the skeletal girders of the upper tiers that they could shoot right over the hill at the nomad forts and castles behind it. And all the time the city kept on rolling. It showed no sign of slowing in the marshes; its huge tracks sank down through the mire and mud to grip bedrock beneath. At its stern, exhaust stacks hawked up thunderheads of smoke. Uprooted trees were wedged between the teeth of its tracks. The ground throbbed like a drum-skin. The horizon trembled. It was still a mile or two off, but it was moving quickly, and Fever noticed that the men around her were moving too, running back to Dryships Hill as if they thought they would be safe there.

Fever started to go with them, edging backwards, unable to drag her eyes away from London. It was hard to fight the instinct that told her to get away from something so big and powerful. No wonder Cluny had been terrified when it rolled into her dreams. Cluny had more imagination than Fever; she had understood better the heft of the new city; its predator strength. It was all that she could do to stop herself from turning and running.

Lady Midnight called out, “Don’t you think we ought to try to get aboard?”

“They won’t let us,” said Fever, looking at the little ant-like figures on the city’s skirts. “They’ll think we’re northerners, they’ll shoot us down.”

“I’ve been called a lot of things, but never a northerner,” said Lady Midnight scornfully. “Besides, we’ve Captain A. You’ll vouch for us won’t you, Captain A?”

Captain A said nothing, but she set off anyway. Fever followed, and noticed that others were going in the same direction; soldiers from London, forgotten by their enemies, were hurrying across the city’s path towards the outer tracks, where iron stairways reached down almost to the ground. One of them was waving something – a tattered banner, torn from its pole – and from a sandbagged gun-nest at the top of those stairs men waved back, and readied a long metal ladder to let them climb aboard.

Fever started to run. The wet ground shuddered under her as London neared; the water in the puddles danced. Lady Midnight staggered, cursing. The city was slowing, probably wanting to make sure it had knocked out all the northern forts before it crawled into the range of their cannons. As it slowed, men came down the stairs and fitted their ladder into brackets that stuck from the bottom step and slid it down until its lowest rung was inches from the ground. The foremost of the fleeing soldiers grabbed it and started to climb.

“Wait! Wait for us!” gasped Fever, running, though reason told her that she could not be heard above the racket of London’s wheels and engines.

Half the soldiers were aboard now; the man with the banner waved it triumphantly as he reached the top of the stairs.

Fever fell, sprawling on her face in a soft and slimy patch of bog. By the time she had crawled out and wiped the mud from her eyes the last of the soldiers was climbing the ladder.

“Wait!” she shouted, running, lungs straining, throat burning. “Wait!”

The men on the city helped the last climber aboard and prepared to raise their ladder.

“Wait!”

One saw her and pointed. The others noticed her. They left the ladder there. The city was moving not much faster than a brisk walking pace, and as Fever and Lady Midnight scrambled across the band of disturbed earth near to the outermost track, the dangling ladder came to meet her, its bottom rungs whisking through the long grass, like a ladder to heaven in a fairy tale. A man came down it, seized hold of Andringa and started to heave him up; Lady Midnight followed, pushing from below. Fever was the last aboard; she grabbed the ladder, climbed a few rungs, and could go no further. In the end they hauled it up with her clinging to it like a shipwrecked sailor to a piece of wreckage. They helped her off at the top, but doubtfully. She lay beside Lady Midnight and heard them say, “These two ain’t ours. They look like misshapes. Old Crumb won’t have put their sort on his list.”

Andringa was sprawled nearby, looking about as dead as anyone Fever had ever seen, but he heard too, and opened his eyes. “Sergeant,” he said, “this lady is under my protection, and the other is Fever Crumb. She is Dr Crumb’s own daughter, come home from the wilds, and she will certainly, certainly be on his list. . .”

Thank St Kylie
, Charley thought, as London finally began to slow. All night and all day the place had been quaking like a jelly. He had lost count of the number of bruises he had from banging into walls, or having things bang into him. Wherever he went in the Engine District, staggering like a drunk across its tilting pavements, things had been falling from shelves, or cascading out of cupboards which swung open suddenly as the city lurched. People had been warned to stow stuff safely, but things had been forgotten in the rush, and nobody had quite imagined how rough London’s first ride would be.
A ship on a stormy sea would feel like this
, he thought,
and sailors learn to cope, don’t they
? But he had never been on a ship, or seen the sea. He had spent the whole night concentrating on just not being sick, and when the battle started and the huge, reverberating booms of the guns came quivering through the fabric of the city, he found himself wishing bitterly that the Underground had won and stopped the thing from ever being built.

Feeling sullen and sleep-deprived, he edged along the crowded pavements behind his master. Dr Crumb seemed to think that sleep and comfort were like hair; affectations which good Engineers should do without. All night he had been busy, and now that the city was almost at its destination he had chosen not to rest but to come down and check all the buttresses and bracings on Base Tier, in case the recoil from those huge guns up above was putting too much stress on them.
All well and good
, thought Charley, glaring at his back,
but why does he have to drag me with him
? He choked on the hot and stinking air, kicking his way through huddles of miserable people who had come aboard in a hurry before the city moved and had not yet been assigned quarters of their own.

They had checked three of the big iron braces without finding any sign of cracks or warping, and Dr Crumb was just preparing to check a fourth when a man came shouting, “Oi! Dr Crumb!” It was one of Quercus’s coppertops, the badge on his shako glinting in the Base Tier gloom.

“What is it, constable?” asked Dr Crumb. “Is there an emergency? Nothing structural, I hope?”

“No, no, sir, no,” the policeman said. “It is only . . . we have your daughter aboard, sir.”

Charley grabbed a handrail to steady himself, and hoped the coppertop would think it was just the lurching of the pavement which made him sway and blanch. Fever Crumb? Here?
Alive
and
here
?

“My daughter is dead,” said Dr Crumb.

“I can’t help that, sir,” said the man. “She came aboard with a foreign misshape woman and Captain Andringa. He swore she’s Miss Fever Crumb. But he’s been took to the infirmary now, and we can’t let her go topside unless we’re quite sure of it.”

Charley was sure of it. It would be just like his luck.
Is she completely indestructible
? he wondered bitterly. So it had all been for nothing; Fever was back despite his best efforts. Dr Crumb would not want Charley any more.

He followed Dr Crumb and the coppertop along the walkways which bridged the Great Under Tier and down a stair into one of the side-crofts. A ragtag crowd of battered soldiery had gathered there, barely recognizable as the same brave fellows who had left London to defend the northern approaches. The smoke from London’s engines still lingered under the high iron roof, but through vents and grilles the evening light came in. Under one such vent, where the air was freshest, a young woman waited.

“Well, sir,” asked the coppertop, in a confidential way. “Is that her?”

“It. . . It looks a little like her,” Dr Crumb admitted.

“It’s her,” said Charley. He was shocked at Fever’s appearance too. Would hardly have known her, if it weren’t for those mismatched eyes of hers, which widened slightly as they lit on Dr Crumb. Her prim white coat was gone, replaced by northern clothes so dirty that they looked as if she’d taken them off a dead she-tramp in a muddy ditch. Her greasy hair trailed almost to her shoulders. Her face was altered too; gaunt, bruised, empty-looking. In the hollow of her throat hung a nomad amulet; wires and circuitry and little bones.

Motioning to the policeman to remain where he was, Dr Crumb went over to her. Charley, assuming the gesture had not applied to him, went too. Her mouth twitched. She was trying to smile, but after the long trauma of capture and chase and battle she could not quite remember how. Charley didn’t know that, though. He just thought,
Still the same frosty little bitch, then
.

Dr Crumb stopped and stood swaying a few feet from the girl. If he felt anything at all he did not let it show.

He said, “I was told you were killed, Fever.”

“That was not true.”

“Clearly. But your mother. . .?”

“Wavey is dead.”

“Ah.”

“She was very brave. She fought and fought but in the end there was a Stalker and it . . . and she. . .”

“Quite,” said Dr Crumb.

Fever was weeping before she could stop herself. She reached for him but he stepped back in alarm and she was left there with her arms outstretched, tears dripping from her chin.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She wiped at her face with the cuffs of her tunic. She tried to laugh, forgetting that Dr Crumb was just as unsettled by laughter as by tears. “I have been too long among the nomads,” she said.

“Yes,” agreed Dr Crumb, and his eyes went to the talisman around her neck.

Charley Shallow, looking on, felt the first stirrings of hope for himself. This wasn’t going the way he’d expected; nor the way Fever had expected, neither. It was like Crumb had armoured himself so thickly against all feeling when he’d thought she was dead that he couldn’t feel anything now she was alive again.

“Father,” said Fever, in a small, experimental way. She had never called him that before. Watching his reaction, she realized that she never would again.

“You should rest, Fever,” said Dr Crumb. “You are emotional. It is to be expected, perhaps. Rest will help you to overcome your weakness.”

She nodded meekly.

“You will excuse me. There is much to do.” He turned to leave, hesitated, turned back. “Please remove that trinket. That thing around your neck. It looks most irrational.”