“Well,” added another man, the blond-bearded warrior in leather armour who’d knocked down Fever’s captor, “we made sure that it was twilight when we got here, so the nightwights would be in the open and we could make a slaughter of them!” He took off a dead ’wight’s head with two blows of his sword and knotted it to his belt by its long hair. Fever risked a glance behind her at the ferns. The boy who had been hiding there was gone. The broken mug had vanished, too.
“We start back before dawn,” Tharp said. “The Great Carn’s heart-fortress has turned south. The march on London is beginning.” He looked up at the pyramid. “What of this thing? Is there treasure inside?”
Cluny looked at Fever, and Fever had the feeling that a huge distance was opening between them. Tharp and his men were claiming Cluny back.
“It is a place of evil,” said Cluny at last. “Burn it.”
“Cluny!” Fever said.
“They were insane, those people of the old days,” said Cluny Morvish, looking down at her. “They were slaves to their own cleverness, just like you Londoners. Those Stalker-things up there are still slaves, remembering and remembering, without choice, or hope. Fire will free them. Burn it.”
“But Cluny, they knew so much, and we shall again. I am not wise enough to understand this, but if I could bring my father here, or some of the other Engineers. . .”
Cluny bent down beside her. She said, “Fever-my-sister, I do understand it. You showed me; you brought me here; you made me see that these visions of mine are just the workings of an old machine. That’s why we must roll on London and destroy it, you see. Because if we don’t, you Londoners will resurrect all sorts of other bad old engines from the long-ago. Those old Ancients that you think so much of, they brought the Downsizing upon themselves. They left the world in ruins. This new world that we’ve made is better than theirs. Oh, Fever-my-sister, in a world of machines, people can’t be free.”
One of Tharp’s men gagged Fever with a rag before she could argue. He bound her hands, and she was dragged away like a bundle while Cluny shouted, “She mustn’t be harmed or assaulted. She has done no wrong. She is my sister.” They heaved her up into a creaking wicker howdah, and through its weave she watched the nervous men take brush and burning torches into the tunnel beneath the pyramid. As the mammoth carried her away downhill, she looked back and saw the white smoke pouring from its apex; the smoke of lost knowledge, freckled with little glowing, dancing scraps just like the ones which had once risen from Godshawk’s Head, except that these were not only the ash of ancient paper but flakes of the parchment flesh of all those age-old Stalkers.
She thought about that nightwight boy, the one who had survived. She thought about him fleeing back alone across the cold hills to his burrow. She hoped that he would get there safely. She wished that she was with him. She had more in common with the nightwights than with the Morvish.
PART THREE
26
PACKING UP
hose past few weeks in London had been busy ones. London had always been busy, of course, and busier still since Quercus took charge, but now the news from the north had raised things to a rare old pitch. Whole factories were on the move. The mills and foundries which had built the new city were being shifted aboard it; the cranes hoisted plastic-smelting vats and huge, egg-shaped steel-converters into place aboard the Base Tier, while land-barges and gangs of men piled cargo in the Gut. Cattle and sheep from the outlying farms were herded in as well, to be kept in dark, cramped, stinking pens which had sprung up between the supporting pillars.
The entire Guild of Engineers had relocated aboard the new city now. The Engineerium on Ludgate Hill had been demolished, and then all the buildings round it, the destruction spreading swiftly down the slopes. This time the pleas and complaints of the rich householders cut no ice with Quercus. Some of them moved aboard the new city too, although the big new homes they’d planned to build there weren’t ready yet. Some ended up in Tent Town. Some loaded what they still possessed on wagons and took off for new lives in Hamsterdam and Paris, calling down curses on Quercus and his schemes.
The common people laughed and jeered, glad to see the rich cut down to size at last. “Good old Quercus!” they said, in the taverns of Tent Town. “That’s shown them!” But they were uneasy. There were stories going round that Quercus was preparing to move London. Everybody knew of someone, some mechanic or site foreman, who had been ordered to move aboard the new city with his family. “But it can’t move yet,” they told each other. “That can’t be right. It isn’t finished. It’ll be a right old squeeze, trying to fit us all aboard before those next two tiers go up.” They fretted about the new threat from the north, and offered up uneasy prayers, but there was no one left to answer them; all London’s old temples had been taken down, their timber and metal stored in the Great Under Tier.
From camps and vehicle parks outside the city bounds soldiers set off in long marching columns and squadrons of landships to shore up Quercus’s defences in the Fuel Country. From the heights of the new city the Movement’s gunners kept a constant watch, and the big naval guns swung on their turn-tables, so that it was hard to tell whether they were pointed at the hills from which Raven and his friends would come or at the restless, grumbling folk of Tent Town.
On the night Tharp’s mammoths reached Skrevanastuut, Charley Shallow was stomping homeward through the mud beside London’s starboard tracks. The city’s wheels towered up on his right like cliffs, and the overhanging skirts of Base Tier kept him sheltered from the drizzle. He’d been supervising some last minute work on the exhaust chimneys at the city’s stern, and he could have found his way back across Base Tier and up the elevators, but the place was so crowded with all these new people being moved aboard that he’d decided it would be easier to walk round to the front.
He’d been kept busy since his promotion. He had always imagined that the life of a full-fledged Engineer would consist of important meetings and posh dinners, but the meetings he had been to so far were dingy affairs, conducted by harried-looking men in grimy corners of the Engine District, and there were no dinners at all; he was lucky if he had time to cram in a pie or a sandwich on his way from one job to the next. Dr Crumb worked Charley as hard as he worked himself, summoning him at all hours, saying in a flat voice, “Copy this,” or “Deliver that,” sending him off to make checks on fuel-lines, exhaust ducts, torsion bars, tracks, wheels, drive sprockets. . . Never a “please” or a “thank you” or a “sorry for getting you out of bed at three in the black morning, Dr Shallow”. Still called him Charley, too, which rankled. The other Engineers joked that Crumb’s heart had broken when he heard the news about his wife and child, so he’d made a new one for himself all out of clockwork. They felt sorry for him in their way, but Charley had come to hate him.
Of course, he was glad of the importance which his new job brought him. Coldharbour and the other apprentices looked at him with real awe now. He had the sort of power he could only have dreamed of a few months before. But it was not in Charley’s nature to enjoy his dreams once they came true. He was already dreaming new and better ones.
He turned across the city’s bows, and was just striding towards the busy boarding ramps which would take him up into the Gut when a voice out of the wet twilight shouted, “Charley!”
It was a girl’s voice, and as she came forward, all blurred by the rain and the dying light he got the sudden, horrible notion that this was Gwen Natsworthy’s ghost, come to take her revenge on him. But when she got closer he could see that she was wide enough to make two Gwens, and when she pulled the hood of her cloak down it turned out that she was Milly Floater, the girl he used to walk out with before his luck improved.
Oddly enough, Charley felt pleased to see her. After those weeks of worry and hard work it was good to have her plain round face smile up at him again, and to remember times when he’d been free to wander round Tent Town with her, taking in shows and circuses. He still looked quickl
y behind him to make sure that nobody he knew could see him talking to her. “Hullo, Milly,” he said.
“Hullo, Charley,” said Milly shyly, pushing a strand of damp hair off her face while her eyes went up and down him, taking in his smart new clothes and the red Engineer’s badge on his lapel. “Cor, look at you!”
“I gone up in the world, Moll,” Charley said, and it felt good to slip back into his Ditch Street voice for once. He jerked his head at the new city. “I live up there now. The new Engineerium, right in the middle of Tier One, next to Quercus’s own gaff. Assistant to the Chief Engineer himself, that’s me. He depends on me.”
“I heard,” said Milly. “My dad saw your name in the news-sheets; they said you’d uncovered a plot and all sorts. You’re an important man now, Charley. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
Charley felt his mood start to sour. Of course, she’d not just stopped to pass the time of day. She wanted something.
“They’re saying there’s a list,” said Milly. “People in Tent Town, I mean. Everyone knows there’s not going to be room on that thing for all of us. Some people are saying there’s lists being made of who gets to go and who stays behind. You know anything about that, Charley?”
“I ain’t heard nothing about no list,” Charley said. “You know how rumours run round Tent Town. Specially at a time like this.”
“’Cos they’re saying it’s going to be essential workers only, Charley,” Milly blurted. “And my dad and mum and me and the little ones, we ain’t essential, are we, not anyhow you look at it? So I was wondering if you could get our names on the list, Charley. ’Cos otherwise I’m scared we’ll all get left behind, and St Kylie only knows what’ll befall us then!”
“I ain’t heard no talk of anyone getting left behind,” said Charley warily. “Wouldn’t be fair, would it? Everyone’s equal in the new London.”
She reached out suddenly and took his hands in hers; brought her face close to his. “Charley, you know that ain’t true,” she said. “Just look at the size of the new city, and then look at all the people in the old one, and you know it ain’t true. I won’t ask no more of you after this; I won’t pester you for nothing, I promise; I know you probably got much finer girls than me up on that Tier One of yours. But just please get me and Dad and Mum and the nippers on that city when it goes. I wrote you out their names and everything. Please, Charley.”
She pushed a scrunched-up bit of paper into his hand and he untwisted it and saw the names of her family written there in her round, childish hand, with little smiley faces instead of dots above the “i”s. It made him feel tall, standing there with her looking up at him in that pleading way. So he’d become the sort of man that people begged things from. Tall, and kind-hearted, but still one of the people, not some stuck-up cloot like the rest of the Engineers; he still remembered his roots. He thought about kissing Milly, but settled for patting her head instead, as if she were a dog. “I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll make sure. If there is such a list, you’ll all be on it.”
She was nearly pretty when she smiled. “Thanks, Charley!” she said. “Promise?”
“My word’s my bond,” he said.
“What’s that mean?”
“It means I promise.”
He really did mean it, too. It gave him a warm glow somewhere under the breast pocket of his wet white coat as he left her and went striding up the ramps. How grateful they’d be to him, those Floaters! They’d spread word of his kindness through all their neighbourhood once the new city was rolling: “That Dr Shallow, he’s all right; he’s not like the other toffs. . .”
But it wasn’t a feeling that lasted. While he was waiting for the elevator to take him to Tier One he started to wonder whether Milly would keep her promise to him. Would she really stay away from him once she was aboard? ’Course she won’t, Charley. She’d always be looking him up, asking for something or other: work for her dad, bigger quarters, better rations. She probably still fancied him; still hoped he’d ask her out again, the silly cow.
And when the packed elevator was carrying him upwards, he started thinking how, if even Milly Floater had heard about Crumb’s list, word of it must be all over Tent Town. He imagined them all out there, getting worried, getting angry. If this new city’s going to move, he thought, it had better move soon.
The elevator reached its stop with an uneasy shudder. As he pushed his way out he dropped a little scrunched-up piece of paper into the used-tickets bin beside the door.
27
PHOSPHOROUS FINGERS
he Morvish rode through the dark until dawn came to meet them over the lowlands. These men drove their mammoths hard, lashing them with long whips when they dawdled, and when one stumbled in the night and fell they shot it, divided its crew and cargo among the other beasts and went on.
Fever, tumbled about on the howdah floor like a package in a hamper, slipped several times into thin sleep and bad dreams and woke at last to find daylight above her. A thin, end-of-summer snow was falling, and the mammoths were coming down a last dismal slope into the ruins of Aberdeen. The town had been abandoned before Fever was born, when the snouts of winter’s glaciers started snuffling at its northern walls, but sometimes in summer nomad bands would pitch their tents there, and search the empty houses for things people had forgotten to take with them when they left.
There was a scatter of tents and campavans to the south of the town, and a Morvish landship was waiting there for Tharp. While it was warming its engines, Fever’s captors dumped her on the wet ground beside it and loosened the ropes on her wrists just enough for her to eat the grey and gluey porridge that they gave her. She wanted to speak to Cluny, but Cluny was busy in the headman’s tent, and from the shouts and angry cheering that emerged Fever guessed that she was telling her vision of London again. She had been swept back into her role as prophetess; the spark and symbol of the nomads’ rage.
Wistfully, Fever recalled her dream of staying in the hills with Cluny. It might even have been possible, if the nightwights could be reasoned with. And she knew they could be. That was the only treasure she had brought away from Skrevanastuut; the knowledge that the nightwights were her relatives, and she was not quite the last thing of her kind after all. They could learn. I could teach them. The Scriven race could thrive again. . .
But there was no way back, and the only nightwights within earshot of her now were the dead heads which Tharp’s men were untying from their mammoths’ harnesses and impaling on the prow-spikes of their landship. They set their standard there too: the red mammoth skull with its trailing horse-tails. Finally they dragged Fever up the boarding-ramp and slung her in a storage locker.
A few men left the party there, taking the weary mammoths back along the longshore to join the Morvish herds and the women and children in the Kometsvansen. Lump and Carpet went with them, and so did Marten. He wasn’t pleased to go. “I should come with you to the war,” he told Cluny. “I’m old enough to fight.”
“And if you fall, Marten-my-brother, what then for the Morvish?” asked Cluny. “If things go badly in the south for us you will be Carn of our clan, and you will have fighting a-plenty to do.”
“Cluny, please,” he begged her. “You can tell Tharp the Ancestors want it. Let me come. I don’t want to hide in the Kometsvansen with the women and the babies.”
Tears in his blue eyes. Cluny wanted to hug him but dared not, for fear she’d hurt his spiky, twelve-year-old pride. She watched him climb up on Lump’s back; watched him ride off behind Carpet and the other mammoths, wondered if she’d ever see him again. As she turned away a vision of London slammed into her, blasting in off the dry sea like a squall. She went down on her knees, and Tharp took her arm and helped her rise, leading her to his waiting landship.
In the locker where they had stuffed Fever there was a blanket and a bucket. Sometimes, if she was lucky, someone would come to empty the bucket and give her water and a little food. The only light was that which seepe
d in through a chink in the planking of the outer wall. For a while Fever thought about trying to widen that chink until it was big enough to escape through, but when she peeked out through it she saw there was no point; there was nowhere to run to out there and nowhere to hide. The landship was moving south across the old seabed, skirting shallow lakes, creeping through bogs on roads marked only by lines of wooden posts. It passed a line of armoured mammoths, then a convoy of clattering battle-trucks and a huge-wheeled, slave-powered landship stencilled with the markings of the Suomi. War horns howled, dinning across the flatlands. Beacon-smoke smudged the horizons.
She passed three days like that, and three bad nights; hungry, uncomfortable, frightened of the men who sometimes opened the locker door to leer in and pass comment on her, although they seemed awed enough by Cluny and the Ancestors not to touch her.
She did not see Cluny, and at first that made her glad. You stupid, superstitious, smelly Morvish barbarian, she thought, glaring at the ceiling of her prison as if it was Cluny herself. No wonder the world is full of ignorance, when there are fools like you in it to set fire to all the wisdom of the Ancients. But she could not stay angry at Cluny for long, not even in ceiling form. The other memories of her were too sweet. Anyway, Cluny had been right; what they had found at Skrevanastuut proved that the Ancients had been just as irrational as modern men, except that they’d waged their wars with far worse weapons. It was as painful to think about them as it was to think of Wavey, or Arlo, or others she had lost. Only in her memories of Cluny was there comfort. “I miss you,” she said to the ceiling. “I love you.”