Read Scrivener's Moon Online

Authors: Philip Reeve

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #General, #Family, #Fantasy & Magic

Scrivener's Moon

Philip Reeve has WON the CILIP Carnegie Medal,
the Blue Peter Book of the Year, the Nestlé Book Prize –
Gold Award and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize

 

He has been SHORTLISTED for the Whitbread
Children’s Book of the Year and the WHSmith
People’s Choice Awards

 

Praise for Philip Reeve’s books:

 


Philip Reeve’s epic
Mortal Engines
series has sent the
imagination of many a child completely wild since it first began

Lovereading4kids.co.uk

 


A series worthy of sitting alongside Philip Pullman’s
Dark
Materials
in the annals of teen fantasy

Waterstone’s Books Quarterly

 


Big, brave, brilliant

Guardian

 


A staggering feat of engineering, a brilliant construction that
offers new wonders at every turn . . . Reeve’s prose is sweeping
and cinematic, his ideas bold and effortless

Publishers Weekly

 


My favourite contemporary children’s author. . .
His books are full of adventure, humour and invention
and are superbly well-written

Charlie Higson

 


The idea behind
Mortal Engines
has other authors crying ‘I
wish I’d thought of that!’

Geraldine McCaughrean

 


Witty and thrilling, serious and sensitive,
Mortal Engines
is one of the most daring and imaginative science fiction
adventures ever written for young readers

Books for Keeps

 


His imagination is electrifying

Frank Cottrell Boyce

 


A ground-breaking futurama

TES

 


Philip Reeve’s intricate imagination makes
J. K. Rowling feel like Enid Blyton

Independent

 


I stayed up till three in the morning to finish it.
Philip Reeve is a genius

Sonia Benster writing in The Bookseller

 


Reeve is a terrific writer

The Times

 


Philip Reeve is a hugely talented and versatile author . . .
the emotional journeys of his characters are enthralling,
never sentimental and always believable

Daily Telegraph

 


There’s a fabulous streak of frivolity running through
everything that Reeve writes. . . Like many of the
great writers who can be read happily by both
adults and children, Reeve uses the frivolity
to hide his own seriousness

Guardian

 


Reeve writes with confidence and power. He is not only a
master of visceral excitement, but at every turn, surprises,
entertains and makes his readers think

Books for Keeps

 


Intelligent, funny and wise

Literary Review

 


Reeve is a master of young adult fiction

Scotsman

PHILIP REEVE was born in Brighton in 1966.
He worked in a bookshop for many years before
becoming an illustrator and then an author. His
debut novel MORTAL ENGINES, the first in the
award-winning epic series, was an instant bestseller
and won the Smarties Gold Award. The MORTAL
ENGINES quartet and three subsequent prequels
cemented his place as one of Britain’s best-loved
authors. In 2008 he won the CILIP Carnegie Medal
with HERE LIES ARTHUR. He lives with his wife
and son on Dartmoor.

 

www.philip-reeve.com
www.philipreeve.blogspot.com
www.mortalengines.co.uk

By Philip Reeve

 

Mortal Engines
Predator’s Gold
Infernal Devices
A Darkling Plain
Fever Crumb
A Web of Air
Scrivener’s Moon

 

No Such Thing As Dragons

 

Here Lies Arthur

 

In the BUSTER BAYLISS series:

 

Night of the Living Veg
The Big Freeze
Day of the Hamster
Custardfinger

 

Larklight
Starcross
Mothstorm

To Sarah

 

CONTENTS

 

 

 
 
Prologue
 

 

PART ONE

 

1    
The Homecoming of Fever Crumb
 
2    
Engineerium
 
3    
The Future Sights of London
 
4    
Ancestral Voices
 
5    
Victory Ball
 
6    
The Carnival of Knives
 
7    
News From the North
 
8    
Plans
 
9    
Pies, Spies and Little White Lies
 
10    
Northward Ho!
 
11    
The Revolutionists
 
12    
Across the Dry Sea
 
13    
The Raven’s Nest
 
14    
A Sword at Sunset
 

 

PART TWO

 

15    
Nomads’ Land
 
16    
A Rational Man
 
17    
Running True
 
18    
Fever in the Comet’s Tail
 
19    
Charley’s Game
 
20    
Prisoner of the Morvish
 
21    
The Long Shore and the Lonely Hills
 
22    
The Dark Beneath the Fells
 
23    
The Place of the Dead
 
24    
In The Upper Room
 
25    
Besieged
 

 

PART THREE

 

26    
Packing Up
 
27    
Phosphorous Fingers
 
28    
Moving On
 
29    
Toasted Sandwich
 
30    
At Three Dry Ships
 
31    
Battle’s End
 
32    
Hungry City
 
33    
The Scrivener’s Moon
 
 
 
 
 
Epilogue
 
PROLOGUE

e forded the river as the daylight died
and blundered into thick undergrowth
between the birches on the far bank.
Sobbing with fright and pain he raised
his hand to his chest and felt the hard
point of the arrow sticking out through
his coat. He dared not look down for
fear that the sight of it would make him faint, so he shut
his eyes and took the bloodied wooden shaft in both
hands, and snapped the head off. Pain knocked him to
his knees. Groping behind him he found the feathered
end of the arrow where it stuck out above his shoulder
blade, braced himself, and wrenched it out. He ripped
his handkerchief in half and crammed the pieces into the
wounds.

He was a stranger in that country; an explorer; a
scientist; a soldier of fortune. His name was Auric
Godshawk. In years to come, when age had slowed
him, he would be king of London, but on this night
he was still in his prime; a strong Scriven male in his
sixtieth year, the age hardly showing. That must be how
he had survived the ambush, he thought. That must
be how he had managed to escape into these woods.
Black trees, grey sky, the first stars showing. Cold now
the light was gone. He wished he’d brought a hat with
him, or gloves. He supposed he had left them behind
in the inn or camp or wherever it was that he had been
when the ambush happened. His memory seemed to be
missing vital chunks. He felt as weak as London wine, and when he looked at his hands they did not seem to belong to him at all; frail, girlish things they seemed, turning blue where they were not crusted with his own blood.

Black trees and a starry sky and his feet crunching through the leaf-litter with sounds like someone munching on an apple. Great Scrivener, what would he not give for an apple?

Then he was lying on his side on the ground and he knew that if he did not rise and make himself go on he would lie there for ever, but he could not rise. He thought of London and his young daughter and wondered if she would ever know what had become of him and he said her name to the night, “Wavey, Wavey,” until it made him start to cry.

And it was daylight, and the stink of mammoth was all about him as he opened his eyes. The animals stood around him like shaggy russet hills. Men moved between their tree-trunk legs. They were talking about him in words that he could not catch. He wondered if they were planning to save him or finish him, and he said, “Help me! I can pay you. . .”

One of the men drew a knife, but another stopped him and came and crouched at Godshawk’s side. Not a man, he saw now, but a girl, with her long hair escaping in mammoth-coloured curls and tendrils from under her mammoth-fur hat. Weak as he was, Godshawk brightened. He had always had an eye for pretty girls.

“I am Auric Godshawk,” he told her. “I am an important man among my people. Help me. . .”

He was lying among furs in a nomad tent, and nothing moved except the shadows on the low, curving roof. He was burning hot and he tried to push the furs off but the girl was there and she pulled them back over him and touched his forehead with her hand and held it there and it was so cool and she whispered things to him and the light of a woodstove was on her young face and in her red hair. He had seen her before. He remembered her sitting on a mammoth’s back somewhere, watching as he went by.

He tried to speak to her, but she had gone, and now an ugly old man was leaning over him, chanting, singing, humming to himself as he made passes over Godshawk’s face and body with a strange talisman of bones and birch-bark and scraps of age-old circuitry, jingling with little bells. He propped Godshawk on his side and scooped bitter-smelling slime out of an Ancient medicine bottle and smeared it into the wounds in his chest and his back and bound poultices of moss over them.
Your Ex-rays have come back from the Lab
, he chanted, and held up a sheet of mammoth-skin parchment so fine that the light of the fire shone through it, and Godshawk could see a childish skeleton drawn there, with red-topped pins stuck in to mark his wounds.

When he woke again the man was gone; the girl was back. He lay watching her. A tall girl, big-shouldered and broad across the hips, not a bit like the willow-slender, speckled Scriven women he liked, but her long autumn-coloured hair was lovely in the firelight and her eyes were very large and dark and she made him remember faintly a few of the pleasures of being alive. He called and she came to him and when she leaned over the bed with the loose strands of her hair falling down across his face he said, “Kiss me, mammoth-girl. You’d not deny a last kiss to a dying man?”

Her smile was sweet and quirky. She stooped and touched her warm mouth quickly to his cheek. “You are
not
a dying man,” she said.

And he dozed in the warm gloom and dreamed of his daughter Wavey, but for some reason he saw her not as the little girl he’d left behind in London but as a woman nearly as old as him, and woke up weeping, and the girl was there with him again and held his hand.

“I dreamed of my daughter. . .” he tried to tell her. He could not explain. Everything was so strange. It was all sliding. His memories were as slippery as slabs of broken ice on a pond. Something was terribly wrong, and he had forgotten what it was. “My little girl. . .”

“Hush,” she said. “You’re feverish.”

For some reason that made him laugh. “Yes! I am feverish. . . I am
Feverish
. . .”

 

And it was night and he was alone and he needed to pee, so he clambered out from under the fur covers and the night air was cold on his bare skin and the embers in the woodstove glowed, and as he reached under the bed for the pot he saw a movement from the corner of his eye and looked up, and there was a girl in the shadows watching him.

She was not his mammoth-girl. In his confusion he thought for a moment that she was Wavey, and he started up, and she rose too, but as they walked towards each other he saw that she was a stranger; a Scriven-looking girl, watching him with wide-set, mismatched eyes, one grey, the other brown.
Poor mite
, he thought, for she was a Blank; the Scrivener had put no markings on her flesh at all. There was an angry star-shaped scar above her breast and as she reached up to touch it he reached up too, in sympathy and understanding, and felt the same scar on his own flesh. Then lost memories started rushing past him like snow and he stretched out his fingers to the girl’s face and touched only the cold surface of a looking glass.

His own numb fear looked back at him out of her widening eyes.

“No!” he shouted. They both shouted it; him and the girl in the mirror, but the only voice he heard was hers. “I am Auric Godshawk! I am
Godshawk
!”

But he wasn’t. Godshawk had died a long time ago. What remained of him was just a ghost inhabiting the mind of this thin girl, his granddaughter. Her name, he suddenly recalled, was
Fever Crumb
.

And once he knew that, he could not stay. These thin young hands were not
his
hands; these eyes were not
his
eyes; this world was not
his
world any more. With a terrible sadness he let himself be folded down, like an immense and wonderful map being crumpled into an impossibly small ball, and packed away into the tiny machine that he had once planted, like a silver seed, among the roots of Fever’s brain.

With his last thought, as he left her, he wondered what had brought her here, alone into the north-country with an arrow through her.

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