Fever Crumb

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  floortile, looked at it, and let it fall. "And it's true that most of the things Godshawk tried to invent were crazy -- new colors, flying machines, devices for recording dreams. He spent most of his spare time tinkering with Stalkers' brains. He dissected the last of the Scriven's Stalker warriors in the course of his researches, which is one of the reasons they could not defend themselves when the riots began. But he worked on other things as well, and I believe that one of them still exists, buried in that vault down there beneath us."

  Fever turned around, taking in the view and trying to ignore the strange feelings that the place aroused in her. Feelings mean nothing. Stop feeling and think.... A wash of sunlight silvered the far-off roofs of Ludgate Hill. "I am surprised that no one has found this place before," she said.

  "The causeway which linked this hill to London has been cut," said Solent. 'The way across the lagoons is hazardous. The vault was a secret even in Godshawk's day. No one knows that it is here. And the door in the hillside was completely overgrown; I could never have found it from outside."

  "So how did you learn of it?"

  "Stories. Rumors."

  "It seems irrational to buy a house and dig a tunnel simply because of stories...."

  "But I found the vault, didn't I?" said Kit Solent triumphantly. "Now it is just a question of getting inside. Of course, I could

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  announce my discovery -- I know people who would be happy to take the top off this hill and use brute force and gunpowder to get into Godshawk's inner sanctum. But I don't like such methods. I want to try a subtler approach. And I think you can help me, Fever Crumb."

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  ***

  8 S kinner's boy

  Too shy to speak, Charley went silently after Bagman Creech through the busy Stragglemarket. He hung back, quiet and watchful, while the Skinner talked to some of the stallholders there, listening to their accounts of the strange-looking girl who had come their way that morning, and the sedan chair which some believed had smuggled her away.

  "It was Bert @kinson's chair," said one man. "I'm surprised at him, aiding a dirty Patchskin like that."

  "We have no proof that she was a Scriven," Bagman Creech reminded him. "That is for me to find out. And it was not the chairmen who aided her, but their passenger, the man who hired them." He glanced upward, judging the time by the way the sun hit the tops of the old warehouses above him. "I'll be taking a little refreshment at the Scary Monster. Pass word for this @kinson to come and find me there."

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  The Scary Monster and Supercreep was a big tavern halfway down Cripplegate. It was set back from the street, with tables arranged outside under a dim see-through canopy made from salvaged plastic. It wasn't the class of place where Charley thought he would be welcome, but Bagman Creech looked back at him and jerked his head to show that Charley should come with him. They sat down together at one of the tables and studied each other in the brownish light that came through the plastic roof.

  "You look hungry, boy," said Bagman Creech. "Ted Swiney given you any breakfast today?"

  Ted Swiney hadn't, but Charley wasn't going to admit it, in case word of his disloyalty got back to the publican. "I'm all right, Master Creech," he said.

  A soft cough rumbled like far-off thunder down behind the Skinner's ribs. He blinked his pale eyes at Charley. "I remember being mostly hungry when I was a boy."

  Charley, caught off-balance by the sudden notion that Bagman Creech had once been a boy, said, "That must have been a long time ago, Master Creech."

  Bagman Creech started to laugh, and kept on laughing until the laugh turned into a long choking spasm. He retched like a cat with a furball and coughed up a big, blood-veined pearl of phlegm, which he spat onto the flagstones under the table. "It was that, Charley," he whispered hoarsely, wiping his eyes with his shirt cuffs. "It was a long, long time ago. And food was scarce

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  for normal folks in them days, for the Scriven ruled this town, and took all the good things for themselves and their cronies. And that's why I was mostly hungry, then."

  Meanwhile, the serving girls, looking like white hens in their crisp aprons and bonnets, had been gathering at the tavern door to gawp at their famous guest and whisper about who would take his order. (" You go, Gertie." "No, you go!") Now their mistress, the Scary Monster's fat landlady, shoved her way between them and hurried to Bagman's side to curtsey and twitter.

  "Oh, Master Creech, this is an honor, how can we serve you, good Master Creech?"

  "Well, Mistress," said Bagman Creech, "I'll take a mug of your porter, and a stack of pancakes for my young assistant here."

  "Oh, yes, sir," fluttered the landlady, looking at Charley in a way no one had ever looked at him before, as if he meant something.

  "And honey!" called Bagman Creech, as she hurried off. "Plenty of honey." He looked at Charley again, and smiled. His lean old face was so unused to smiling that Charley was afraid it might crack and drop off his bones like plaster off a wall. He had long teeth, scuffed and yellowed as the keys of a pub piano. "Pancakes was my favorite, as I recall," he said. "Honey pancakes 'specially."

  "Thank you, Master Creech," said Charley, whose mouth was watering at just the thought of pancakes.

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  The old man shrugged. "I generally work alone," he said. "But...Well, Ted Swiney's a bad man, but there's truth in what he said. Maybe it is time I had a youngster to help me out. How old are you, Charley?"

  "Eleven, Master Creech. Maybe twelve."

  "Old enough, then. Got a mum and dad, have you?"

  Charley shook his head. For as long as he could remember, he'd just hung around the Mott and Hoople, sleeping in the cellar or the yard out back, doing odd jobs for Ted Swiney, eating what scraps he could find. Probably his mother had been one of Ted's servant girls, but he didn't remember her. Who his dad was, only the gods of London knew.

  Bagman Creech coughed thoughtfully. "And you wouldn't be too brokenhearted, I'm guessing, if you never had to go back to Ted Swiney's employ?"

  "Oh, no, Master Creech!"

  '"Cos I'm like you, Charley, all alone. And it seems to me that maybe it's time I started training up some young fellow to take over my job, when I'm too old to do it anymore. How would you like that, Charley? To sign on as my 'prentice?"

  "What, and hunt Patchskins, Master Creech? I don't think I'd be brave enough."

  "I didn't think I'd be brave enough, Charley, when I was your tender age. But the time comes when you just have to do what's needful."

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  He stopped, coughing a little and thumping his chest with a fist. The pancakes had arrived. A tower of them, golden brown and crispy at the edges, with honey in a pot to drizzle over them. Charley started rolling them up one by one and cramming them into his mouth.

  "Killing a Scriven isn't like killing a human being," Bagman explained. "They aren't made like us and they don't think like us, and if you let them live and breed there might come a time when it'll be them hunting us, and our kind hiding in the dark. You have to remember that. It's difficult sometimes. Take this one we're after, if we corner her, she's going to look almost like an ordinary girl. You've got to be ready for that. She might look pretty. She might say, 'Please don't harm me.' She might say, ' Please have mercy.' And you got to be ready for that. You mustn't let pity creep in. You got to keep telling yourself, it ain't no different to killing rats."

  He reached inside his coat with a quick, well-practiced movement and suddenly there was a weapon in his hand. A long, ugly thing like the skeleton of a gun, with a big, oil-shiny spring inside it and a ratchet to wind the spring back. More notches than Charley could count had been cut into its worn plastic handgrip.

  "This is a spring gun," said Bagman solemnly, holding it so the light slithered over its shining surfaces. "Those Scriven wouldn't let anyone but themselves own firearms, and we couldn't have afforded firearms anyway, but some of us worked in machine

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  shops, so in our off hours we made these, in secret like. A spring gun will chuck a dart hard enough and far enough to cut a Scriven down, and when they were down we'd flay their skins off. Not to stop their spirit coming back, the way the foolish people tell it, but more by way of a trophy, to show the rest of London that Scriven died as easy as the rest of us."

  Charley wanted to hold the gun. He wanted to aim it at imaginary Scriven and imagine himself back in those glorious days, slaughtering Patchskins and making London safe for ordinary Londoners again. But just then he became aware of a man edging up to the table. A big man, with the broad shoulders and over-muscled arms of a sedan chair bearer. He was looking sheepishly at Bagman Creech, and turning his cap around and around in his hands.

  "Master Creech?" he asked. "I'm Bert @kinson, taxi bearer. I 'eard you want a word."

  Bagman Creech took a slurp of porter, and nodded as he gulped it down. "That's right, and thank you, Master @kinson. You know what this is about, I take it?"

  The chairman twisted his cap in both fists, as if he were wringing it out. "They're saying that girl we took aboard down Stragglemarket was a Patchskin. I'd never have had 'er in my chair if I'd known."

  "No one blames you, I'm sure, Bert," said the Skinner. "But what I'd like to know is, who was the fare you were carrying, the one who made you take the girl aboard?"

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  @kinson looked deeply thoughtful for a moment, and Charley started to fear that he had forgotten. Chair bearers doped themselves with powerful drugs to give themselves the strength to carry their burdens around the city. They weren't famous for quick thinking, or even thinking at all. But @kinson's face brightened and he said, "Picked him up at the tram Terminus this morning. A gentleman, by the way 'e talked. 'E had two nippers with him, and 'e told us to follow the girl. Which was easy, on account of her big huge straw hat."

  "And when you'd picked the girl up, where did he have you take her?"

  "Why, to his home, sir. They all got out together. One of them old crumble-down Patchskin manses up on the 'eights. Ludgate 'ill Gardens, I think."

  Creech nodded calmly. "Your help's highly 'predated, Master @kinson. Highly 'predated."

  Charley was halfway down his pancake pile, honey running off his chin. "What now, Master Creech?" he asked stickily, as the chair bearer went away. "Do we go and talk to this bloke?"

  Bagman Creech looked at him, or maybe through him, thinking. "Not yet," he said. "We want to go careful, like, if this bald-headed finch is Scriven, and he's a-sheltering her, we don't want to put him on his guard. We'll ask around and work out who he is, and who she is, and what he wants with her. Hopefully it'll turn out poor old Lily Dismas was mistaken. But if not, we'll have to do what's needful." He drained his mug and stood

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  up, already scanning the passersby as if one of them might have the answers that he needed. He picked up his stick and leaned on it while he waited for Charley to mop up the last of the honey. "Down these mean streets a man must go ... he said, and it sounded to Charley like the start of something, like a quotation or something, but he didn't say any more, just nodded and grunted, and set off walking.

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  ***

  9 The Scent Lantern

  To Fever's relief there was no more talk of opening the Godshawk vault that day. She walked with Kit Solent among the mist and ruins on the hilltop, and then went back beneath the hill. Since they had no water with them, she accepted a drink of cold, strong tea from Kit's pocket flask, and perhaps that was what made her feel giddy and slightly overexcited on the long walk back to Ludgate Hill.

  Toward evening the sun peeped in under the quilt of cloud that had settled over London in the afternoon. It spilled gold light into the overgrown gardens of Kit Solent's house, and into his drawing room, where he sat with his daughter on his knee and his son at his feet and told a most unlikely story full of giants and heroes and light sabres and gingerbread houses. Fever watched him, and wondered how a rational man could waste so much time talking such nonsense to children. She tried not to listen to the story, and when she found that she was listening anyway and that she was quite

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  eager to hear whether the hero rescued his princess, she made herself say good night and go upstairs to bed.

  It was dangerous, this house. She felt that if she let down her guard she would find herself enjoying all its luxuries and irrational little pleasures, and who knew where that would lead? She had often heard Dr. Crumb and the other Engineers talk about Thaniel Wormtimber, who had been a good Engineer himself before he left the Head and let himself be corrupted by the city. She did not want to end up like him, lost in London's maze of unreason.

  ***

  Her bedroom was on the top floor of the house. It had sloping ceilings, and when the wind blew the rafters creaked and the rooftiles rattled. There was a vase of cut flowers on the bedside table, which was irrational, and a potted plant on the windowsill, which was not, because Fever knew that it would absorb some of the carbon dioxide she breathed out and help to replenish the air with oxygen. The bed was very large and soft, quite unlike the hard little cot that she was used to. On the wall above it hung another picture of Kit Solent's dead wife, looking much younger than she did in the picture downstairs, in a frame carved in the shapes of hearts and roses.

  Fever carefully took the picture down, since it served no purpose. As she was propping it against the wall over in the room's far corner she noticed the little handwritten label on the back, which read,

  Miss Katie Unthank

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  That must have been Katie Solent's name before Kit married her, Fever thought, remembering the irrational custom which made women take the name of their husbands. Unthank. She knew it at once. The digger whom Dr. Crumb had gone to visit on the day he found her had been called Unthank. She thought for a moment, wondering if there was some link, then dismissed it as coincidence. For all she knew, Unthank was a common name.

  She put on her night things and blew out the candle and lay on the big, soft bed, waiting for sleep. Downstairs she heard the voices of the children as their father tucked them in, and then, after a little more time, the sounds of Kit Solent making his own way to bed. After that there was only silence, the creaking of the old house, the distant noises of the city. But Fever could not sleep. However hard she tried to clear her mind of thoughts, they kept sneaking back in. She had had an eventful day -- perhaps the most eventful day of her life -- and it was hard to keep from thinking of it.

  Katie Solent haunted her thoughts, too. That name, Unthank, could not help but recall to her the story that Dr. Crumb used to tell her when she was little. Was it possible that Katie had had a child before she married Kit? One little girl whom she had abandoned in a basket on the marshes, near her father's dig? Was that why Kit had asked Fever into his house? Because he had found out somehow that she was Katie's daughter? And was he her father?

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  She had never wondered before about who her real parents were. Dr. Crumb had told her when she was small that it did not matter, and she believed him. But remembering how cozy little Fern had looked upon her father's lap, she found herself wishing very much that she had grown up with a father like him, and a mother, too.

  "Don't be ridiculous," she told herself, sitting up in bed. She must have been lying there awake for hours. Wanting to clear her head, she got up and lit her candle and padded downstairs to find a glass of water. A faint, haunting musk hung in the air, making her wonder if Kit had left the scent lantern alight when he went up to bed, but when she looked into the drawing room the lantern was open and unlit. The portrait of Katie Solent smiled down at her from the wall, and she held up the candle for a while and stood there looking at the picture, and at her own reflection in the glass, trying to make out a resemblance. But there was none, and she could not really believe that she was Mistress Solent's daughter. In her memory, just out of reach, was the face of a quite differe
nt woman that matched her own much better. Who did she remind herself of?

  Unsettled, she went to the kitchen for her drink and then hurried quietly back upstairs. On the first landing she noticed a door standing open. It had been shut earlier but Kit Solent must have been in there before he turned in. Fever's curiosity overcame her. She pushed the door wider, and stepped through into a library.

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  It was nothing like as large as the Order's library at Godshawk's Head, and many of the volumes looked worthless -- novels and poems and fantasy quartets, no good for anything but pulping -- yet it was impressive, all the same. Bookcases alternated with windows all the way round the room, and through the windows the moon shone, making silver-gray shapes of light on the floorboards. On a table in the center, a book lay open beside a lit scent lantern, the source of that ghostly smell which still flavored the air.

  Fever breathed deeply, intrigued by the musty odor. It was the same scent that Ruan had put on downstairs, or one very like it. And it so nearly reminded Fever of something. She closed her eyes, and the scent seeded her mind with pleasant memories. Dew-wet evening lawns. Lilies in bloom on geometric pools. Fire balloons lofting into a lilac sky...

  She shook her head, almost angry at herself. Those were not memories! The image was a fantasy, or a half-remembered dream, neither of which had any place in a well-ordered mind.

  Feeling giddy, she leaned on the table, and looked down at the open book. It was a large, old-fashioned volume, with circular pages bound between two discs of leather in the Scriven style. On the open page was a drawing, or perhaps a diagram. Fever couldn't make it out at first. She set down her candle and placed her hands on the table on either side of the book and looked down at the page, and suddenly she was falling into the picture.