Scrivener's Moon (7 page)

The older man turned away in disgust. “Some Skinner’s boy! He works for that Dapplejack slut who Quercus made Chief Engineer.”

“That’s not true!” said Charley. “I mean, it is, but I never
asked
to work for her. It’s no fault of mine she got set up over the whole Guild. I hate her. That’s what got me in trouble tonight. I was spying on her. Her and her Scriven-loving husband, and that scrawny brat of theirs. . .”

“I thought you said you was at the Carnival of Knives?” the young man growled.

“I was! An’ so was they!”

All three of them looked sharply at him. The white-haired man said, “Wavey Godshawk was there?”

Charley nodded. “She knows that dwarf showman. I heard them talk. He brought news for her from the north. Something about some
power
.”

Both men looked at the priestess.

“Which power?” she said. “Arkhangelsk?”

“I dunno. I couldn’t hear much. Then I had to scarper.”

Charley didn’t know why, but what he’d said had made his three new friends tense like spooked dogs. They kept glancing at each other, asking questions with their eyes that they didn’t want to voice in Charley’s presence. He felt pleased.

“I can find out,” he said. “I’ll find out what she’s up to, if you want, and come and tell you.”

The older man sniffed. “You know who we are, kid?”

Charley nodded eagerly. “I saw that sign you painted. You’re the Underground, ain’t you?”

The man nodded. “We’re the only ones in London with the guts to stand up to Quercus and stop him stealing our city away.”

“Well, I can help,” said Charley earnestly. “You just have to let me know where I can find you again. . .”

o, Snow Leopard. You are Chief Engineer, and we have a city to move. We cannot afford to lose you.”

Not many people dared say no to Wavey Godshawk, but Nikola Quercus, Lord Mayor of London, Land-Admiral of the Movement, was one of them. He was a mild-looking man, no taller than Dr Crumb, pale-complexioned, dressed in a simple grey tunic with none of the braid or jewellery that Movement warriors usually favoured. He did not look like a man who had conquered and looted half the cities of the Birkenmark, or fought off the Suomi horde at Hill of Skulls, or won himself an empire that stretched all the way north from the Anglish Sea into the Fuel Country. Yet he had done all of those things, and many more, and now he sat at the Crumbs’ breakfast table in the watery sunlight of a London summer, looking at the map of the north which Wavey had spread out there.

“Where did you say this black pyramid lies?”

“Just here, Lord Mayor. . .” The map had been rolled, and showed a tendency to curl up at the edges. Wavey walked around the table, weighting the corners down with three cups and a jam-pot. She leaned over her lord mayor’s shoulder and pointed to a spot among the busy contour lines of the old Scottish mountains. “The pyramid is not marked. Godshawk knew where it lay; I remember him pointing it out to me on his charts. Alas, those perished with him in the Skinners’ Riots.”

“That is beyond the edges of the ice.”

“Not quite. Not at present. Not in the summertime.”

Wavey had been thinking all night about Borglum’s news, and she had come down to breakfast determined to set off for Skrevanastuut at once. None of the sensible, rational objections which Fever or Dr Crumb raised could stop her from summoning the Lord Mayor and explaining her scheme to him. Now they sat mutely watching while Quercus raised all the same arguments that they had tried.

“It’s savage country north of London. The brigand-kings of Leeds and Lincoln have no love for Londoners.”

Wavey chuckled. “I am not proposing to go
alone
. I hoped I could borrow one of your landships, and a few of your soldiers. We’ll take your excellent new roads north over the old sea, and avoid all the savages. We shall meet no brigand-kings when we reach Caledon; no one lives there at all.”

“Only nightwights,” said Quercus darkly.

“
Nightwights?
” Wavey laughed again. “Bogey men for nomad nursemaids to frighten little children with. Surely you do not still believe in
nightwights
, my Lord Mayor?”

Quercus said, “If you really think there is valuable old-tech in this pyramid, we could send another Engineer. Steepleton, or Lark.”

“Lord Mayor, did I not explain? This place may have been made by the first Stalker builders. We might find Stalker brains there, which would be useful enough, since we have no spares left, and our Stalkers are wearing out at a frightening rate. Or we may find something better: the secret of making Stalker brains for ourselves; the answer to the mystery of how the Stalkers are powered. You think the new London is mighty now? Imagine how much mightier it would be if you could power it by Molecular Clockwork!”

Quercus said nothing.

“How many Stalkers do we have left now?” asked Wavey. “Fifty, is it?”

“Fifty-six. Another sixty in the north with Rufus Raven’s Lazarus Brigade.”

“Well there you go. You could do with some more, I’m sure. Steepleton and Lark know nothing about Stalkers. I am the only one qualified to investigate this site. If you lend me a landship I could be there and back in a few weeks and bring home all sorts of wonders. Dr Crumb and his colleagues are perfectly capable of continuing the work on London while I am away.”

Quercus scratched his chin and studied the map.

“If I don’t go there, someone else will,” Wavey warned. “Native taboos may keep nomads and snowmads away, but news that the tower is open is sure to spread. When it does, adventurers from Paris and Hamsterdam and Bremen will set off, hoping to secure its secrets for
their
cities.”

Those three cities were London’s main rivals. They had scoffed at Quercus’s plan when it was first announced, but now they were growing worried; in the past year they had all stopped selling steel and other raw materials to London. Paris was rumoured to be building a huge chassis of its own.

“Very well,” said Quercus suddenly. That was his way; he considered things deeply, made decisions swiftly, and stuck to them. “Take a landship, and my blessing. Dr Crumb will serve as Acting Chief Engineer in your absence. We shall tell no one your real reason for going.”

Wavey smiled in the calm, contented way she always did when she had just got something that she wanted. “I shall set out with Master Borglum. We can tell people that I am going to visit friends in the north.”

Dr Crumb started to protest again. He had never been further north of London than his old childhood home at Lesser Wintermire, and Lesser Wintermire had been quite bad enough. The far north was a wild place, where science and reason were unknown. But he had never been able to get his own way with Wavey, not since that first long-ago day when she decided that he was to be her lover, and he didn’t now: she hushed him, and she and Quercus began discussing arrangements and the best route north.

Fever went to the window. The rain was still falling. Out in the sodden street a passing apprentice Engineer paused to peer at the house, probably wondering why the Lord Mayor’s chair and bodyguards were waiting outside. She caught his glance, his eyes dark as charcoal smudges.
Charley Shallow
. . . Why did that boy always make her feel guilty? she wondered. It wasn’t as if
she
had tried to murder
him
. . .

He saw her watching him and went hurrying on his way, trying to pretend that he had not been looking at the house at all.

It wasn’t his fault, Fever decided. It was just London, so dingy and crowded, so full of upsetting memories. She felt caged here; had felt it ever since they brought her home from Mayda. A view opened in her mind of worldwide moors under a high sky; curlews calling, ice on the skyline like a long white wave, curtains of light dancing in the dusk. She could almost see Skrevanastuut itself; a black pyramid on a bare hill.
North.
Even the word sounded clean and free.

She turned, and her mother stopped talking and looked up expectantly at her.

“Wavey,” she said, “when you go north – can I come with you?”

“Oh, that would really not be—” Dr Crumb began.

But Wavey bared all her many teeth in a brilliant smile and said, “Fever, I was
hoping
you would say that!”

n the lower slopes of Ludgate Hill, round on the St Kylie side where the houses already wore white crosses to show that they were marked for demolition, there was a long, low, salvage-plastic eatery called Nye’s Pies. Who Nye was, and whether he existed at all or had just been dreamed up by some former owner looking for a name that rhymed with “pie”, nobody knew and nobody cared. All that mattered about the place was this: it had a long counter, at which labourers queued to buy their pies, and fourteen greasy tables where they sat to eat them.

“The table nearest the window,” that was what Charley had been told by the London Underground before they booted him out of the robing room behind the temple of St Kylie and let him find his own way home. “Someone will be waiting.” So here he was, scurrying through the chill, half-hearted rain, shoving the pie-shop door open and stepping inside, blinking at the steam and warmth. The place smelled of damp overalls and unwashed bodies, which at least served to mask the smell of the pies. Big, grimy men sat at every table except the one by the window, which was occupied only by a girl in worker’s gear, dark hair escaping in random curls from under her orange headscarf.

Even from the doorway Charley could tell she was a looker, and he grinned, congratulating himself on the way his luck had turned. He watched another man approach the table and the girl send him away. “I’m waiting for a friend,” he saw her say, reading her lips. Then she looked at Charley and nodded. “There he is.”

Charley squeezed his way between the chairs and tables. The girl had already bought two pies. She slid one to him as he sat down. “You’re Charley Shallow,” she said, not smiling, black eyes flicking across his face and clothes. A gypsy-looking girl with a long nose and rosy cheeks and a small, red, serious mouth. Older than Charley, but not too much older.

As if she had caught his thoughts she said, “How old are you, Charles Shallow?”

“Eighteen,” said Charley.

“Never.”

“Seventeen then. I don’t properly know, to tell the truth. I was brung up at the old Mott and Hoople on Ditch Street, back before they knocked it down. I dunno when my birthday is nor how many I’ve had or nothing.”

“Fifteen, more like,” the girl said. Charley could tell she was his sort of person, a good London guttersnipe, not some posh bit from the top of the hill. He leaned back in the rickety chair and grinned easily at her and said, “If you want to hear what I know you’d better get listening quick, before I get any younger.”

The girl frowned. “I don’t want to hear nothing. Not here. How do I know I can trust you? How do I know you wasn’t followed? Eat your pie, then we’ll go somewhere we can talk.” She picked up her own pie and took a big bite from it, and the grease of its nameless filling ran down her pointed chin.

Charley blushed, angry at himself for being stupid and at her for pointing it out. Spies and terrorists didn’t just discuss their secrets in pie shops. She’d met him here so it would look natural, just a girl meeting her boyfriend for a bite of dinner. Then she’d lead him off somewhere secret, where the rest of her gang would be waiting. He liked the idea that all the people in the pie shop would imagine she was his sweetheart. It cheered him up. He said, “Don’t I even get to know your name? Since you know mine an’ all?”

The girl took a second bite while she thought this over. “Gwen Natsworthy,” she said with her mouth full.

“Then I’m pleased to meet you, Gwen.”

“Eat your pie.”

So he ate his pie and when he was done he followed Gwen Natsworthy through some of the mean little alleys that were still standing in that quarter of the city until she was satisfied that they were not being followed, and then out across the endless, windswept, empty lots which had once been Whitechapel and Shadwell, until they came to a hole. There were steps leading down into it and a brick-lined portal at the bottom. Weeds grew round it. It gave Charley the creeps. Reminded him of that nasty tunnel he’d slunk along once in search of Fever Crumb, the day the Movement came. Still, he wasn’t going to let Gwen Natsworthy see that he was scared, so he went down the steps and she followed, and in a little maze of forgotten cellars down there her friends were waiting for him.

There were five of them. One was the priestess-like woman he had met before, but he did not know the others. They were men, and they all wore workers’ slops, those stiff garments of blue and blue-grey hemp that had become the unofficial uniform of London these past few years. One man was smoking a pipe and the fug from it hung between their faces and Charley’s so that it was hard to see them clearly, and he wondered if that was deliberate.

Gwen Natsworthy followed him in and kicked a door shut behind her. The lantern flames wavered, throwing odd shadows up the walls, and for a moment he felt uneasy again ’cos they could kill him down here and who’d ever know. Who’d come looking for Charley Shallow? No one, that was who.

“This is the boy,” said the priestess (though Charley wasn’t sure she was a priestess now; the mark had gone off her forehead and she was in normal clothes like all the rest).

“The Skinner’s boy, as was,” said one of the men.

“Still am, master,” said Charley. He had got the impression at his first meeting that these Undergrounders had it in for Wavey Godshawk, and he thought he could use his background as a Skinner to impress them. “I work for the northerners, but I’m a Londoner through and through: a proper Mockney, born within earshot of Bowie Bells. I just been biding my time, waiting for a chance to bring some harm to that speckled witch.”

“Good lad,” a man said.

“No.” It was the pipe-smoker who had spoken. He had a posher way of talking than the rest. He took the pipe out of his mouth and pointed at Charley with its stem. “That sort of talk is no good. It’s not Wavey Godshawk that we hate. Her speckled skin does not concern us. Quercus and his northerners don’t offend us because of their northern-ness. You mustn’t get the idea that we are crackpot London-for-the-Londoners fanatics, peddling hate for hate’s sake. The only thing that we are against, the thing that we are sworn to destroy, is the new city.”

The others muttered their agreement. Even the man who’d called Charley a good lad said, “Sorry, Doc, yeah.”

“Doc’s tellin’ it right,” said Gwen Natsworthy. “My old street got cleared away to make that new city. It’s nothing but waste and lunacy and wickedness.”

“My street too,” said one of the men. “All our homes are gone. Quercus promises new homes for all aboard that monstrosity of his, but who’d want to live in them? Eh? Who?”

“Nobody,” said Charley obediently, although secretly he was thinking that quite a lot of people would, given how airy and neat the houses on the new city were compared with the slums that Quercus had cleared. But he wasn’t going to risk offending these people. This was the most interesting thing that had happened to him for months. He was looking forward to seeing where it would lead.

“We want this new city stopped, see?” said a third man; an old plastic-smith judging by the way he wheezed, his lungs ruined by the fierce fumes from the blending vats. He reminded Charley a bit of Bagman Creech; same phlegmy whine; same mad light in his eyes. “We want it stopped, and London put back the way we liked it; the way it always was.”

“The way it was but
better
,” insisted Gwen Natsworthy. “With trees and stuff, and good homes for all, and parks where the kids can play.”

Yeah, and fountains of wine and gingerbread houses and pavements made of gold
, thought Charley, but he didn’t say it.

“Now, Charley,” said the one called Doc, with an air of someone calling things to order. “Now then, you spied on Wavey Godshawk’s meeting with this short chappie, this Borglum. Is that so?”

“’Tis,” said Charley, peering at the old man through his haze of pipe smoke. His face seemed familiar. Take off that greying beard, that shock of hair, and. . . Who had he been? Someone used to better things than brewing bitter plots in basements, that was for sure.

“I heard the dwarf say he had some news from the north,” he explained. “News about a power. That’s all.”

“I am thinking Arkhangelsk,” said the priestess. “Arkhangelsk is the chief power in that region.”

“Could mean trouble,” said Doc, and sucked thoughtfully at his pipe so that an ember glowed bright red inside its bowl.

“All depends who the dwarf works for,” said the plastic-smith. “We can’t be sure he’s Quercus’s creature.”

“But we know the Godshawk woman is,” said the priestess. “So if the dwarf brings news to her it must surely be news that helps Quercus, or can harm our friends.”

“Could mean trouble,” said Doc again.

“I’ll tell you something else,” said Charley. “Whatever this news is, it’s got Wavey all fired up. She’s sent a note to Quercus himself asking for leave of absence. I heard a couple of the Guildsmen talk about it at the Engineerium. They say she’s going north herself.”

“The Chief Engineer?” Doc said. “Going north?”

They all stared at Charley and he thought,
They ain’t much of a conspiracy if they didn’t know that!
Well, that was all right with him. If they weren’t much good it only made it easier for him to impress them, and he liked to impress people, specially when it was easy and some of them looked like Gwen Natsworthy.

“She’s taking her daughter with her,” he said. “I don’t know what it’s about. She says it’s a holiday, but everyone knows she’s got some hush-hush business going on up there.”

One of his listeners turned to Doc and said, “Our friends must be warned! Great gods, do you think she knows about the alliance?”

“Quiet, you flap-jawed cloot!” growled the plastic-smith, his eyes on Charley.

“It’s all right,” said Doc. He stepped forward and put a hand on Charley’s shoulder, and Charley looked up into his big, kindly face and suddenly knew where he had seen him before. Take off the beard and that shock of steel-wool hair and he’d be Dr Stayling, the one who was Chief Engineer until Quercus dismissed him and gave his job to Wavey Godshawk. So
this
was where he’d ended up!

“It’s all right,” he said again, looking seriously at Charley. “I think we can trust Charles. I think this a great day for our movement. At last we have a friend, an
operative
indeed, inside the Guild of Engineers.” He paused, looking rather pleased with himself; he had been waiting for a chance to use the word “operative”. “The information that he has already shared with us may prove vital to our friends in the north. We shall send word at once to warn them of this new development. And Charles, we shall ask you to keep listening. You are close to Dr Crumb, and Dr Crumb is close to Quercus. Keep your ears wide, and tell us everything that you hear.”

“Oh, I will, sir,” Charley said, “I will!” Nobody had placed such trust in him since old Bagman died, and he felt a little bit guilty about letting them think he was as fired up as them over this moving city business, when in truth he didn’t care tuppence whether London moved or not so long as he was safe and prospering. He told himself it was only a white lie. He’d just said what they wanted to hear. It pleased him to see the smiles that he’d put on their faces as they came crowding round to congratulate him.

“Welcome,” they said.

“Welcome, Charles!”

“Welcome, mate.”

“Good to have yer with us.”

“Welcome to the London Underground!”