Fever Crumb (28 page)

She had prepared herself to see her mother dead, like Kit Solent on the heath. But Wavey was still moving, sprawled on the stone floor of the inner room. Above her, forgotten, Godshawk's giant city-shifting engine stood like a huge totem, reflecting gleams of lamplight from a hundred dusty fins and ducts.

Fever knelt down by her mother, and a sudden Godshawk-memory showed her Wavey as a little girl, fallen over on the drive and crying, "
Ow, ow, ow
!"

"Ow
," said Wavey, shifting, trying to find comfort on the hard, dusty floor. She found none. The Stalker's blades had not ripped her, but his armored fist had struck her like a hammer and flung her hard against the engine. Bones had shattered. Tears of pain shone on her face, and the sight of them filled Fever with panic. What should she do? What should she do?

"Go back to London, quickly!" her mother said, reaching up and touching her, stroking her face with a shaking hand. "There is something wrong with that Stalker; the brain I put into him must have some fault. I should not have brought him here...."

"It is irrational to build machines whose principles you do not understand and whose actions you cannot predict," said Fever, her Engineer's attitudes spilling out in spite of herself. "This mobile city you propose will be the same. Where will it lead?"

Wavey wasn't listening. "Go, Fever.'" she said. "What if the Stalker returns?"

Fever looked sideways and saw the magneto pistol lying on the floor. A small green light shone like a sequin on its handle to let her know that it was charged. She picked it up and it felt odd and heavy in her hand.

"Leave me that," begged Wavey. "Go!"

"I'm going to go and find Master Solent," said Fever. "It would be unwise to leave him alone up there."

"Why can't you do as you're told? He could kill you!" Wavey struggled to raise herself, but the pain was too much and she fell back, half fainting. "Great Scrivener!"

Fever stood up, backing away from her. "Someone else will come soon. Quercus will come, won't he, when his fight is won?"

It felt wrong to leave her mother there, weeping with pain and unable to move.
But
feelings mean nothing,
Fever reminded herself. She gripped the magneto pistol and went quickly out of the vault and up the stairs that led to the old garden.

***

Ruan had promised that it was going to be fun, but Ruan .was silly because it wasn't fun at all. They had come all through that horrid tunnel, scared of ghosties and Dapplejacks all the way, and the walk had made their legs ache very badly and at the end of it there was just a horrid room with boxes in it, and they couldn't sleep there because it smelled funny and they were scared the ghosties might come for them out of the tunnel. So Ruan had found this door and they'd sneaked up the steps and reached another door and gone out through it into open air and there'd been trees and the moon. And Ruan had said, "Now it will be fun! We'll sleep under the stars, like children in a story!" But it still wasn't fun, because he'd made her climb all up a horrible steep hill and her shoes had got wet and she'd dropped Noodle Poodle and they'd had to find him in the dark and at the hill's top there was a horrid ruin just full of ghosties so they didn't go in there but went round it instead and found a sort of summer house with moss and ivy instead of a roof and they went in there and Ruan covered them over with leaves the way the Helpful Birds did to the children in the storybook, only it didn't work because the wind blew through all the holes in the summer house and the leaves that were dry blew away and rustled like ghosties in the corner and the leaves that were wet were cold and clammy. So she'd cried and said she wanted to go home, and Ruan had cried, too, and they'd been afraid to put the candle out, and he'd read them a story out of the red storybook, and somehow they had fallen asleep.

Now Fern was awake, all cold and stiff. It was horrible sleeping outside. She wanted Daddy, and she wanted to go home. Ruan was still sleeping, with his hair flopped over his face. "Wake up, Ruan," she said, but he just grunted at her and stayed sleeping. She rummaged in the bedspread bundle and found a bit of cake for breakfast and went outside with it, breaking off crumbs to give to Noodle Poodle.

It was just starting to get light, and it was very quiet because even the birds were still asleep. There was mist all round the hill and the hill stuck out of the top of it in sunlight and little jewels of water were shining on the grass. And up the hill, out of the mist, came a man made all out of metal, with knives for fingernails.

Fern looked at him. He looked at Fern. Fern smiled at him. "It's Daddy!" she shouted, and ran toward him as fast as her fat little legs would carry her.

***

There were footprints all the way up the stairs. The new Stalker's huge, blank prints, and Fever's scuffly boot-marks from the day before, and here and there a tiny print, like the print of a child's shoe. Fever, running toward daylight and the open air, was so confused by Godshawk's crowding memories that she imagined those footprints might be Wavey's, and Wavey still a little girl.

The door at the top of the stairs still stood wide open where the Stalker Grike had shouldered his way out. Outside, mist hung thick and white above the dripping bushes. Fever started climbing and stopped on the first terrace, near one of the pools. The mist pressed close all round her, as if she were something precious, wrapped in cotton wool. The pool in front of her was green with weed, but at the same time, superimposed upon it, she could see it as it had looked twenty years before. She went down on her hands and knees on the mossy concrete at the edge of it and looked down, and she saw a) a surface of small green leaves, packed so tight that the water was hidden, and b) a clear pool, six feet deep, with speckled carp drifting lazily beneath the lily pads.

She pinched herself, trying to dim the insistent memories. She was not Godshawk. And nor was she the daughter Wavey wanted her to be, or the Engineer Dr. Crumb had wanted to turn her into. She was sick of being the vessel for other people's hopes....

The weight of the strange gun in her hand made her think of

Kit Solent and the thing he had become, if she could just find him, and use the gun on him, at least she would have achieved something for herself. But how was she to find him in this fog, with Godshawk's memories flitting between the trees like phantoms?

She was about to shout his name when she heard another voice, a child's voice, high above her in the mist. "Daddy!"

She knew then who it was that had come through the tunnel ahead of her and opened the door. She knew who had made those small footprints on the stairs. She knew that Fern and Ruan had come to Nonesuch Hill, and that the new Stalker had found them there.

But at the same moment, and before she could react to that new knowledge, she heard someone come out of the doorway below her and start running uphill toward her.

"Quick," she said urgently, turning, imagining that it was Quercus or some of his men, freshly arrived through the tunnel.

But it was Charley Shallow.

***

All through the dark of that tunnel Charley had crept, following their voices and the light of their lanterns, far ahead. He'd kept urging himself to go faster and catch them up, but he was scared of the machine men, and he knew he couldn't bring himself to shoot the girl when she was close to that older lady; she might not even know that Fever Crumb was a Scriven, and it would be terrible to kill a proper human by mistake. So he hung back. He hung so far back that he heard the crash and clatter of the Stalkers fighting while he was still sneaking along the tunnel, and, of course, he could not know what it was. When he reached the tunnel's end he saw the big door opposite him standing open. He could see nothing of his quarry, but there were faint voices, and lights and shadows moving in some deep, inner chamber.

It was a strange place, all right. Full of old-tech and old magic. It scared him. So he waited at the tunnel's end, watching the open doorway of the vault and wondering what to do. And after a while his vigilance was rewarded, because the girl came out, just her alone. He had the spring gun ready but he hadn't time to steady his nerves and shoot, and she went past him and through that other door without even looking at him.

He was still scared, but he knew that this was the best chance he was likely to get, and he had to jump at it, for Bagman's sake. He crept past the vault entrance and then pelted up the stairs.

Emerging into the mist he felt a heartbeat's dismay -- how was he to find her? Then he thought of the ruin on the hilltop. That was where she would be. Something about the old house drew her. He looked down, and there were her footprints, dark green on the dewy grass. Following them, he ran up the hill, scanning the mist ahead of him. But he was looking for someone his own height or taller; he didn't see Fever crouched in front of him until she shouted, "Quick!"

By then he was almost on top of her. Fever tried to scramble out of his way but he swerved to miss her at the same moment, and he went the same way as she. "Sorry!" he heard her say, as he crashed into her, tripped over her, and fell. He landed hard on the grass and the spring gun was jarred out of his hand. He saw it go. It went slowly, like something in a bad dream. It skipped once off the concrete on the side of the pool, and dropped over the edge with a plop like a big frog jumping. He could see little individual leaves of duckweed in the spurt of water it threw up. When he reached the pool's edge himself there was a gun-shaped hole of dark water in the surface of the weed. He plunged his hand in, shoulder-deep and groping, but he could not touch the bottom. And all the time the girl was behind him, and he turned and saw her standing, staring down at him with her ill-matched eyes, her mouth opening to say something or scream for help or something. And she started to run and then hesitated, looking down for something she'd dropped in the grass and he looked, too, and saw it first. It was this other gun, a weird-looking one, all wires and stuff. And he grabbed it quick before she could, and rolled over, and pointed it up at her.

"Oh, don't be ridiculous!" said Fever. "That's not a -- that won't harm me --" And then she remembered the machine in her head, and realized that it
might
. The boy was shaking, terrified, and the magneto pistol was shaking, too, but not enough to make him miss. She watched him pull the trigger.

There was an astonishing pain, a hard white flash, then nothing at all.

***

She fell on the grass. She lay on the grass with her feet turned in and her arms thrown out to either side, her right arm stretched across the concrete at the pool's edge, her right hand hanging down into the water. Charley scrambled up and wiped his nose on his sleeve and looked at the gun, wondering if there was another shot in it. But he didn't need another. Fever lay still. Her eyes were open very wide, as if in amazement at what he'd done, and they didn't blink. You could hardly tell anymore that they didn't match because the pupils had flared huge and owlish, two wells you could look down into the dark unknown. When he reached out and touched her face her head flopped sideways and a leak of blood like a thick red worm came out of one nostril and started to creep across her face.

That was when, too late, Charley realized that Bagman had been wrong. Not just Bagman, but all the Skinners, wrong, wrong, wrong. Maybe Fever Crumb had been a Scriven and maybe she hadn't, but what would it have mattered if she'd lived? What difference would it have made to the world if she'd grown up and had sons and daughters just like her?
None
, he thought, or
at any rate, not enough to make it worth doing the thing that he'd just done.
She'd been a person like him, and he had killed her.

He threw her gun away as he went running down the hill. He lost Bagman's hat somewhere, too. He ran into those trees that broke like green surf around the hill's foot and hid himself there, trying to get the memory of Fever's dead face out of his head, knowing that it would keep coming back to him forever.

***

On Nonesuch Hill, the boy's running footsteps faded into the mist. Inside Fever's body, machines no larger than germs swarmed in her blood and in the clear reaches of her spinal fluid. Many drifted powerless, destroyed by the magnetic pulse that had disabled the old machine nested in the root of her brain. But there were multitudes of them, and the ones that had survived went on with their patient, endless work, repairing damage and harvesting waste energy from her muscles and synapses. Some clustered round the machine, while others busied themselves with her stilled heart. They were brisk, and mindless, and very good at what they did.

Thirty seconds after the magneto pistol fired, twenty seconds after Charley Shallow turned tail and ran, Fever shuddered and flailed her arms and swallowed a gulp of air and started coughing. She wiped her eyes and looked for the boy. She didn't know she'd been unconscious. To her, it seemed as if he'd vanished. She saw the magneto pistol lying in the grass and picked it up and thought at once of the child she'd heard on the hilltop. She staggered to her feet and started climbing. She felt vague and groggy, and she had sprained her knee in falling, which made her limp. She was halfway up the hill before she realized that her nose was bleeding. She had almost reached the top before it occurred to her that this one hillside in the damp present was all she could see; this overgrown garden, this mist. She remembered the old garden, the float lamps and the carp ponds, but the memories had no weight anymore; they were just the memories of memories, already growing colorless and fragmentary, like spent dreams.

The flash of the magneto pistol had driven Godshawk from her head.