Fever Crumb Read online

  "Stop!" she shouted, and "No!", the words tumbling over each other in her haste to get them spoken. She went as fast as she could on her sprained leg toward the children, and as she went

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  she lifted up the magneto pistol, wondering how close to the Stalker and his terrible knives she had to be for it to work.

  But the Stalker, though he looked round at her, did not move. Nor did he move toward the children. He had unsheathed his blades, but he had not used them. Did that mean that there was some trace of Kit Solent still inside him somewhere? Was it possible that some residual memory in his brain recognized Fern and Ruan, and could not harm them? He had closed his visor, as if to shield them from the sight of his dead face.

  The children looked at Fever. "Miss Crumb!" said Ruan.

  She lowered the pistol. She had wanted to destroy Grike, but she didn't now, not if he meant the children no harm. He was too fine a piece of engineering, and she felt a sort of kinship with him. Perhaps one day, inside his mind, Kit's memories would ignite again. But still in the sunshine those blades gleamed, twitching restlessly now and then, and she could not quite trust him. She let the gun hang by her side and held out her empty hand to Ruan. "Ruan, come here...."

  "It's Daddy!" said Fern excitedly, pointing at the Stalker.

  Fever shook her head. "This isn't your father. Come away from him."

  Obediently, the children came to her. Ruan was carrying a big bundle, wrapped up in a very dirty cloth. The little girl held Noodle Poodle tight and kept looking back at the Stalker, who turned to watch her go past him. "Why did he look like Daddy if he isn't Daddy?" she asked loudly.

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  "People do look like other people sometimes," said Fever, picking her up and turning away, listening all the time for the sound of the Stalker coming after her.

  But the Stalker just stood there watching as Fever, with the girl in her arms and the boy beside her, went down the steep slope of the garden and walked into the mist like someone walking into a white sea. He was going to live a long time, that Stalker. The Movement would send him north, where he would become one of the fiercest warriors of the Lazarus Brigade, and in later years he would serve many other masters, until his battered armor was a palimpsest of stencilled insignia. And always there would be this flaw in him, this softness when it came to small children, and he would never understand why.

  So he stood and watched them walk away from him into the mist, and just before it hid them from him the little girl raised her hand and waved good-bye.

  ***

  While she was up in the sunshine Fever had felt very clear about what to do. Once she was down in the mist again she grew uncertain. Where was she to take the children? What future would there be for them in Quercus's London?

  "Are we going to find Daddy?" asked Ruan.

  "Your father is dead," said Fever.

  The children accepted it quietly. Fever stopped to get a better grip on Fern, and went on through the mist. Ruan walked

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  trustingly beside her. "What will happen to us?" he asked, in a small voice.

  "I do not know. Do you have any relatives who might look after you ?"

  "No," he said, holding back tears.

  Fever thought, I'll take them to Dr. Crumb. Dr. Crumb will know what to do. But he wouldn't, would he? He would tell her to do the rational thing, which would be to give Fern and Ruan to the civic orphanage to care for. Or he would make them shave their heads and bury their feelings and try to turn them into little Engineers.

  She stopped walking. They were close to the door that led into the hill, and sounds were coming out of it. Tramping footsteps and echoey, military shouts in northern accents. The Movement were coming through the tunnel to Godshawk's vault, and she felt relieved that there would be help for Wavey, and then unhappy, because she didn't want to be any part of Quercus's strange plans for London, and she didn't want Fern and Ruan taken from her, as she was sure they would be.

  "Miss Crumb?" said Ruan, sensing her confusion and starting to grow afraid.

  "It is all right," she promised him. "Come this way...."

  She turned away from the door and pushed downhill through scrub and long grass till she saw reeds ahead of her, and water beyond the reeds. Turning right at random, she walked along the edge of the lagoon for a way, and there ahead of her, as if she'd

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  planned to find it, there was a wooden jetty, and drawn up on the bank beside it, the little round boat that had brought Bagman Creech and his boy to Nonesuch House.

  She thought, I can't go off in that. What will Wavey think, when she sends people out to look for me and I am gone ? And Dr. Crumb, what of Dr. Crumb ? And then she got into the boat anyway; shoved it into the water and got into it and had Ruan hand Fern down to her and then get in himself. "The water's coming in," said Ruan, but Fever said it was all right; they would not sink unless a lot more water came in, and if a lot more water did come in, then Ruan would be allowed to bail.

  She found the paddle under the seat and started paddling them away from the jetty, which faded quickly into the mist behind. She still half believed that she was going back to London, to find Dr. Crumb. But she knew that if she did he would want everything to go on as before. The Order would have new premises, and the Engineers would all be busy working on the new city, bolting the Movement's traction fortress onto the Barbican and fitting wheels and the new engines. And she wasn't sure she wanted to be a part of that. She wasn't sure that she was ready to go back to being just an Engineer, and she wasn't sure she was ready to be Wavey Godshawk's daughter, either.

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  ***

  39 Crumbs of Comfort

  While London was distracted by the duel at the Barbican, more and more of the Movement's soldiery had been arriving on Ludgate Hill. Now that the duel was ended they were suddenly everywhere. Up Bishopsgate came more vehicles; not just monos but land barges and traction bunkers, some so wide that they bashed balconies and drainpipes off the houses as they rumbled by.

  Quercus's doctors attended to him in the open, on the Barbican steps, where his new subjects could see that he was not too badly hurt. Meanwhile his warriors started rounding up former councillors and other Londoners who would be able to help them restore order and keep the city working. It was not long before they tracked down the Order of Engineers, and not long after that that Dr. Stayling and Dr. Crumb were hurrying, along with a band of soldiers and Stalkers, through the tunnel that led to Nonesuch House.

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  "Extraordinary!" said Dr. Crumb, as their way took them deeper and deeper under the Brick Marsh. "To think no one knew that this was here!"

  Dr. Stayling was not listening to him. He was too full of Nikola Quercus and his plans. He'd had a brief conversation with the Land Admiral before setting out, and it had left him as giddy as a schoolgirl. "He has remarkable ideas, Crumb!" he kept saying. "Remarkable! There is an engine of some sort in Godshawk's vault, apparently, and Quercus reckons that with a bank of them he will be able to power a mobile city! Think of it! A whole traction city!"

  Dr. Crumb thought of it, and was not much impressed. "It hardly seems a very rational idea. Trundling about the world, snapping up the things one needs from other cities. And what if those other cities follow suit, and start to move themselves ? Then only the fittest and fastest would survive. It would be an absurd way to live....A sort of municipal Darwinism ...

  "But what a spur to progress, eh?" chuckled Stayling, who seemed to be finding it hard to control his emotions. "And this Quercus seems a fine fellow. London will support him, I am sure of that. I believe he should alter his name to something more Londonish, though. Kirk, perhaps?"

  It was Dr. Crumb's turn not to listen. For Stayling had told him before they left Ludgate Hill that Quercus had already sent his technomancer with an advance party along this tunnel, and that it had included Fever. Now he was nearing the tunnel's end;

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  he cou
ld hear the voices of the Movement's warriors echoing in a new way as they stepped into a larger space. He felt his heart beginning to beat faster and faster at the thought of seeing his daughter again. He was going to embrace her, he decided. He didn't care what Stayling said; he was never going to hide his feelings from Fever again.

  And then, as he stepped out into the antechamber, he heard shouts of alarm from inside the open vault. "Stay back!" warned an officer, but Dr. Crumb said, "Let me through, I'm an Engineer," and pushed past him.

  He barely noticed the scientific treasures heaped up in the vault's first chamber. He hurried through into the second, and saw Movement warriors stooping over the wreckage of two Stalkers, asking one another in scared voices, "What can have happened here?"

  He went through the doorway into the third chamber, with men behind him holding up hurricane lamps, Stayling saying, "Crumb! Look there! The engine!" Dr. Crumb glanced at it, but without much interest. He had seen the woman lying on the floor beside it, and he went closer to her and saw who she was.

  He thought she was dead. He wondered if she had been lying down here ever since the riots, her body preserved by some quality of the vault. But when he dropped to his knees beside her she stirred and groaned and half opened her eyes, and he understood that she was Quercus's technomancer.

  "Wavey," he said.

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  She frowned, and smiled weakly as she recognized him. "Dr. Crumb! Always coming to my rescue ...

  He wanted to pick her up and hold her tight, but he could see that she was hurt, so he contented himself with leaning down and kissing her. "I say, Crumb! Steady on!" warned Dr. Stayling.

  "Oh, shut up, Stayling!" he retorted. And then, "Wavey, where is Fever?"

  "She went outside. The new Stalker ran mad, and she took the magneto pistol and went outside after him...."

  One of the Movement soldiers, a medical orderly with a canvas satchel of supplies, was waiting to examine the injured woman. Dr. Crumb waved him forward, gave Wavey's hand an encouraging squeeze, and made his way quickly back through the now-crowded vault. "There is a deranged Stalker outside!" he shouted.

  He had not even noticed the door that led to the gardens, but he found it easily enough. Three warriors and a pair of Stalkers came with him up the stairs. Outside, in the thinning, sun-bright mist they spread out across the ragged gardens, climbing past the ponds toward the hilltop and the ruins of the house that Dr. Crumb remembered so well.

  "Fever!" he shouted as he climbed. "Fever!" But there was no answer.

  He reached the hilltop, and there was no one there except the men who had come out with him, and a tall, new-looking Stalker standing silently with his visor down.

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  "Is he the mad one?" Dr. Crumb asked. The young officer, Captain Andringa, said, "He seems quiet enough now."

  One of the other men had found a fat, unlikely pistol lying in the grass. He held it up. "Stalker gun here, sir. Shall I decommission him?"

  Andringa shook his head. "Best not, as he's calmed down. We have few enough left. We'll send him north to the oil country. He can take out his rage on the Arkangelsk shock-troops at Hill 60."

  More Stalkers came clanking up the steep lawns. They had been searching the reed beds around the hill's foot. One of them carried a thing that looked like a bundle of soggy clothes, but which turned out to be a boy, wet and trembling and terrified. " sir, we found this fugitive. he is unarmed."

  "Who are you, boy?" asked Andringa.

  Dr. Crumb looked at the boy. He knew that crossed-knife badge on his tunic. Of course -- this must be the boy whom Fever had told him about, the Skinner's boy!

  He grabbed Charley by his wet shoulders and wrenched him upright. "What have you done? What have you done with my daughter?"

  "Your daughter, sir?" asked Charley, shivering. "With Fever Crumb!"

  Charley swallowed. He'd never imagined Scriven having

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  parents. He saw the magneto pistol in a warrior's hand and nodded at it. "I killed her, sir. With that fat gun there."

  Dr. Crumb felt a terrifying anger rise up in him, and on the far side of the anger, only emptiness. But before he knew what to do with those wild emotions, Captain Andringa said brusquely, "He's lying. That's not a real gun. It's technomancy. It shuts down Stalkers, but wouldn't harm a human being."

  "Well, I still killed her," said Charley bleakly. "I'm sorry I did, but I did. I fired that thing at her and she fell down dead."

  Tears were spilling down his thin little face. Dr. Crumb let go of him. He quietly recited the prime numbers up to seventy-nine and then said, "Show me."

  Charley looked round, frightened of the men and their guns and their Stalkers. He nodded, and started leading the way back down the hill. The mist was clearing now, but it still took him a while to find the pool where he'd left Fever.

  "Well?" asked Dr. Crumb. He knelt down, looking critically at the grass around the pool. It was flattened in one place, as if someone had lain there for a little while not long before.

  Charley shook his head. "I don't understand, sir. This is the place. See that scrape in the moss? That's where I dropped my own gun. She lay there, sir, and she was dead. I killed her."

  He started to cry, big, weary, miserable sobs shaking his thin body. Dr. Crumb put an arm around him, then both arms, remembering how he used to comfort Fever when she was little.

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  "It's all right," he said. He was thinking fast, and as he thought, he smiled. He could hear Andringa and the other men spreading out across the gardens again, shouting, "Miss Crumb! Fever!" He didn't expect them to get an answer.

  "It's all right," he told Charley again. "She wasn't harmed. She just lay here for a time, and then when you'd gone she got up and went away." Charley sniffed hopefully, glad to learn that he was not a killer after all. "We'll find her, then...."

  "No, no," said Dr. Crumb. He straightened up, staring into the mist. He had never been good at understanding other people, but he had been observing Fever for fourteen years and he felt he had enough evidence to construct a hypothesis, "if she wanted to be found she would have waited near here for us to find her. She wants to be alone. She needs it, needs a chance to think." And he looked out across the marshes, where treetops and the sunlit golden waters of lagoons were showing through the mist, and he felt enormously happy that he could understand what his daughter was feeling. "She can look after herself," he said. "And when she is ready, she'll come back."

  He let go of Charley and turned away, toward the door that would lead him back to Wavey. Before he stepped through it he stopped and looked back and saw the boy still standing there. "What about you?" he asked. "Do you have somewhere to go?"

  Charley shrugged.

  "Best come with me, then," said Dr. Crumb. "There is an

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  injured woman to be taken back to Ludgate Hill, and all manner of equipment to be moved. Yes, come with me; that would be the rational thing."

  He went back into the hill, and after a while Charley followed him.

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  ***

  40 the passing show

  Fever paddled for what felt like a long way, and saw nothing but a circle of water about ten feet across with the coracle in the middle. The children sat in the damp bottom of the coracle and watched her trustingly. Fern said, "Will Daddy come back?"

  "No, Fern," she explained gently. "He is dead."

  "Has he gone to the Sunless Country?"

  "There is no such place," said Fever firmly, because she did not believe in telling lies, not even white ones, not even to little girls. "Dead people are dead; they do not live on, and they do not come back, except in our memories."

  "I want to go home," said Ruan.

  "I'm afraid that is not possible," Fever told him. Fern hugged Noodle Poodle tightly and started to cry. It occurred to Fever that she had no idea how to cope with these two children. But then her father had had no idea how to cope with the baby he fo
und in the basket, and he had managed all right....

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  Soon after that, the sun appeared, like a flat white hole poked in the mist. There were trees ahead, reed beds, the ruins of a mill. Beyond it, a high embankment. It was not the landfall that Fever had expected. In the mist she had turned west instead of north. But at least she knew where she was. On top of that embankment was the Great South Road, up which the land hoys came from Chunnel and Brighton and the south-coast ports.

  She brought the boat ashore there, helped the children out, and together they scrambled up the steep bank. On the top was a wide roadway made of packed, crushed chalk. The mist was thinning steadily; you could see it blowing across the road like smoke, and Fever and the children cast shadows now on the gray-white ground. On either side of the embankment, stretches of water gleamed like battered metal. From the north there came a sound of engines.

  Out of the mist, moving slow and steady, a lone land barge appeared. The brightening sunlight struck little brilliant highlights from the spikes and stars of its decorated upperworks, and lit up all the colors of its painted bodywork. It jingled with bells and jangled with good luck charms, and statues of at least two dozen gods gazed out from a niche above the driver's cabin to ward off collisions. Above them, in gilded script, were the words Persimmon's Ambulatory Lyceum.

  Fever remembered faintly the play that she had stopped to watch at Summertown, and how the traveling theatre had seemed to her to sum up all the unreason of the unreasonable world. But