Scrivener's Moon (16 page)

At last the beach curved north and the wilderness of old Scotland came down to meet it in black cliffs. The air grew cold. Summer was already ending. There was frost in shady places, and inland the white hills slumbered under their icing like disastrous cakes. A broad meltwater river coiled out of the uplands, flowing clear and shallow over beds of golden gravel. Marten and Cluny used it like a road, the two mammoths wading patiently through the water, mile after mile. They camped that night in the lee of some rocks on the bank. In the darkness, above the noise of the river, Fever heard the creaking of glaciers in the valleys further north.

“We could probably walk to the North Pole from here,” she said.

“Let’s not,” said Cluny sleepily. “Skrevanastuut is far enough for me. Anyway, we don’t have time. Look.”

Above the snowy shoulders of the hills across the river the young Scrivener’s Moon was climbing the sky. In another ten days it would be full, and the war on London would begin.

When they moved on next day the river grew steeper, spilling down out of the high country in a long chain of rapids and stony falls which the mammoths could not climb. They kept to the bank, and the going there was easier than it had been on the day before, because they had left the woods behind and the only trees they saw were lonely pines which stood in ones and twos among the crags. This was old country; old rock. Once or twice they passed overgrown forms which might have been ruins; a cleft in a hillside too straight to be natural.

“What do you think it was?” asked Cluny. “The Downsizing, I mean; the thing that did the Ancients in. They were so powerful, and now this is all that’s left. If you don’t believe in gods or spirits or magic, what do you think it was that wrecked the world?”

“There are many theories,” said Fever. “A natural upheaval, probably. An earthstorm or volcano-swarm far worse than those that trouble us these days. Some people believe it was a war, but that seems hardly likely.” She was thinking of the crater of Mayda and other craters she had seen; craters so big you could sometimes barely see across them. “The Ancients were wise. They would not have done that to the world.”

That afternoon they heard wolves howling, which made the mammoths nervous, and Fever too, but Cluny said they were nothing to be scared of. “They will not attack us, not when we have Lump and Carpet with us, and not at this time of the year. The wolves of the west aren’t true wolves anyway; they mingled so much with dog-kind back in the Downsizing that they are half dog. We take and tame the young ones sometimes, and they are our friends.”

Fever recalled the brindled creatures she had seen prowling around the
Kometsvansen
. They had not looked friendly to her. But Cluny knew far more about this place than she did, and if Cluny was not afraid then it would be irrational for her to be.

“Nightwights,” called Marten, who’d steered Lump close alongside Carpet and had been listening to what his sister said. “It’s nightwights we should be worrying about, in these parts.”

“Don’t worry about nightwights, Marten,” said Cluny.

“But everybody knows they live in old caves and tunnels and things, up here near the ice! ‘
Nightwights in the dark beneath the fells
.’ They capture travellers and drag them underground and sacrifice them to their weird old gods and
eat
them!”

Cluny said, “Marten-my-brother, nobody has seen a nightwight for years.”

“The Guild of Engineers does not accept the existence of nightwights,” said Fever. “It is possible that there was once some kind of nocturnal mutant strain that has given rise to legends, but there is no evidence that they survive. Proof would have reached London, if they did.”

“Guild of Engineers doesn’t know much then,” said Marten, giving her a pitying look. “It’s a big place, the north. There are all sorts of things up here, I think.”

“Master Tharp says he treated a man for a nightwight bite once,” said Cluny.

“It was probably a wolf that bit him,” said Fever.

Up in the cold hills somewhere a wolf howled, and others echoed it, and her words did not sound quite so comforting as she had hoped.

Near nightfall they came to a sheltered place beside a spine of rocks on a hilltop where stunted thorn bushes grew up between the boulders and there was wood enough to light a fire. Cluny had shot a hare along the way, and while it cooked Marten led Fever up on to the summit of the rock-spine and pointed north. There, after much peering, she made out the tower of Skrevanastuut, tiny and dark above the blue folds of the hills like a flint arrowhead balanced on the horizon.

“There it is,” said the boy, sounding sullen that Fever had dragged them here yet proud that they had made it. “It’s still further than it looks, with all those ridges to cross, but if we start early we’ll be there by this time tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Marten,” she said. “Thank you for bringing me here.”

“Did it for her, not you,” said Marten, looking away across the valleys where the mist was rising.

Fever took first watch that night, sitting by the fire with a rug wrapped round her and Cluny’s arquebus across her knees, trying to ignore the way Cluny moaned and stirred as Godshawk’s memories seeped through her dreams. Marten curled up and went to sleep as easily as a dog. Fever sat listening hard for movements out there beyond the reach of the firelight. There were plenty, but none seemed threatening, and when the Scrivener’s Moon had sunk behind the hills she gently woke Cluny and snuggled down under all the furs and blankets she could find.

She lay waiting for sleep, watching Cluny cut a new length of match-cord for the arquebus, light it at the fire’s edge and clamp it in the gun’s dog-head. Sleepily she imagined settling in this lonely, lovely land. Building a little cabin, with a garden round it, and a turbine in one of those fast-flowing streams to generate power. Cluny would live there with her. She would teach Fever to hunt. Her nightmares of London would fade in the high silence of the hills, and Fever would build a flying machine better than the one that she and Arlo had made, and launch it from the snow-flecked crags. One day she would take Cluny’s face between her hands and kiss her. . .

Only she wouldn’t. She knew that she wouldn’t ever be able to tell Cluny how she felt. This love would have to be her secret. Well, she thought, perhaps it was enough just to be near her. There must be lots of people in the world who loved someone without ever being loved back; the way that Borglum had loved Wavey.

It was a wistful feeling, but a sweet one. It warmed her while she fell asleep. It gave her pleasant dreams, which ended suddenly as she woke to a dying fire and a terrible screech.

She sprang up, not even knowing where she was at first. The mammoths were bellowing way down among the scrub in the valley; the fire threw smoke in her face; the night seemed full of dark and furtive movements. “Cluny!” she screamed. “Cluny! Marten!”

A hand touched her shoulder and she turned, feeling relieved until she saw whose hand it was. It was not one of the Morvish who stood behind her but a bony, ragged figure, pale eyes gleaming at her through a fall of lank hair. She stumbled backwards, shouting, “Cluny!” In the shadows beyond the fire a red ember glinted like a ruby; it was the lit end of the slow-match, still clamped in the dog-head of the abandoned arquebus. Fever crouched and picked the weapon up, turned, screamed at the black shape which leapt at her across the fire, pulled the trigger, and saw by the flash of white light which exploded from the muzzle a wide, filthy, scarcely human face, shrieking in rage and surprise as the ball smashed into him and dropped him in the embers.

That was the first time that she thought,
Nightwights
. . .

So much for the Guild of Engineers, then. If she ever got back alive to London she would have to set them straight on the anthropology of the north.

Another nightwight came at her out of the dark, snatching the gun, dragging her sideways with it until she overbalanced and let go of it and fell, hitting her head hard on the frosted ground. The nightwight stood over her with a grin full of dirty teeth. Then it rolled up its bulging eyes till they looked like two hard-boiled eggs and flopped down lifeless beside her.

Cluny wrenched her hunting knife out of its back and said, “Where’s Marten?”

“I don’t . . . I don’t . . . I don’t. . .” said Fever, between gulps of the chilly air. The horrible stink of burnt nightwight was in her nostrils, and her Scriven senses coloured it the nastiest grey she’d ever smelled.

Cluny left her to shiver there and strode off across the hillside shouting, “Marten! Marten-my-brother!” The only answer was the panicked trumpeting of Lump and Carpet, sounding very far away. She came back and flung her knife into the ground a foot from where Fever crouched. She dropped on her knees, as floppy as the nightwight she’d just killed, and her face in the last of the firelight shone with tears.

“He’s gone,” she said. “It’s your grandfather’s fault. That machine of his. I was meant to keep guard, but London got into my head again, and that’s when the nightwights jumped me from behind. I hadn’t even the wits to use the gun. Oh, Marten-my-brother. . .”

Fever wanted to hold her, to comfort her, but she hung back. She was too much of an Engineer; Cluny’s grief was too raw and unsettling. She had to do
something
, though, so she pulled out the pocket torch which she had carried all the way from London. She flicked it on and started to trail its pale, moon-coloured beam across the slopes around them, walking first one way, then the other.

Cluny pushed the tears from her face with one hand, leaving it smeared with soot and grease. After watching for a moment she stood up and came and took the light from Fever. “Let me. You’re only messing up the tracks. . .” She stooped low and shone the beam on broken grasses, turned-over stones. “I don’t see any blood,” she said. “I think they’ve taken him alive, down into their nest. . .”

“Oh no,” said Fever.

“No, it’s good,” said Cluny, glancing up at her. Her despair had passed; she looked like a huntress now. “It means he might still be alive, and we can rescue him.”

“How?” said Fever. “Cluny, you must try to be rational. We don’t know where their nest is, or how many they are. . .”

Cluny ignored her and went downhill, sweeping the light over the ground ahead. “They’re supposed to live in old mine workings,” she said. “Or natural caverns. Or just holes in the ground if they can find nothing better.”

Fever watched her, feeling helpless. Reason told her that Marten was probably dead already, sacrificed to some weird old nightwight god inside the hill. The rational thing to do would be to leave; go in search of the mammoths and put as much space between themselves and this place as they could. But she knew she could not make Cluny see that, and slowly, as she watched her scout to and fro among the rocks, she started to realize that Cluny was right; not rational, but right. If there was any hope of saving Marten, they had to try.

luny was thorough in her tracking. Clues that Fever would have missed even in daylight were plain to her; she knelt to shine the torch at the print of a narrow, shoeless foot; at fresh scratches on a lichened rock. It was really quite scientific, the way she gathered and weighed her evidence.

The summer night was short that far north. A grey light was seeping into the sky by the time they found the low, arched entrance to an old mine working. There were tracks going into it and coming out. Bones were scattered among the rocks on the slope below, but they were old, and not the bones of people.

“They have left no one on guard,” said Fever.

“That’s because they know no one’s stupid enough to go into a nightwight’s nest,” said Cluny.

She stepped cautiously into the tunnel. The blackness was so complete that she might as well have stuck her head in a bag. She turned on the torch and saw that the tunnel sloped gently downwards as it reached into the hill, a ribbon of water trickling along the middle of the stony floor. Something lay there, and for a moment Cluny thought it was a body, awfully ripped and dismembered and somehow
flattened
. . . When she reached it, it was only her brother’s coat.

She went back to the entrance. Night was draining quickly from the sky. “This is the place,” she said.

Fever had been afraid it might be. Her deepest, most irrational instincts screamed at her not to go into that darkness, and for once the rational part of her agreed with them. But she could not let Cluny go alone, or let Cluny think she was a coward. To reassure herself, she said, “They are savages, and probably there are just a few of them. A family group. Three or four; maybe a dozen. They live in the dark and shun the day, which tells us they do not like light. Well, we have light. You have the arquebus. It is possible we may survive.”

“You’re such a comfort,” Cluny said. She passed Fever the torch and unslung the arquebus from her shoulder. The blue smell of the slow-match tickled Fever’s nostrils. The imminence of danger made her see everything with great intensity; the rocks on the hillside, the tussocks and wind-writhen thorn trees, all seemed haloed with a silver light, and Cluny looked more beautiful than ever: tall, grim, her heavy hair pulled back.
I would follow her anywhere
, Fever realized.

Just before they stepped together into the tunnel mouth Cluny looked back at her quickly and smiled. “Ancestors keep watch over us both, Fever-Crumb-my-sister.”

Fever did not believe in ancestors, not the sort who kept watch over you, but she found herself thinking of her father as they went along the tunnel. “What is your plan, Fever?” Dr Crumb would have asked her if he’d been there. And she would have had to say, “Get in, find Marten, get out again.” Which she knew was not the sort of plan Dr Crumb would approve of. He would be expecting something with diagrams.

They walked for what seemed a long time, stopping every now and then so that Fever could switch on her torch and check the way ahead for turns or pitfalls. Once the pale cone of light revealed a broken-up skeleton stuffed into a cleft in the wall; bones like gnawed sticks and a grinning skull. But the bones were old, and not quite human. Those wide-spaced eye sockets and the too-many teeth reminded Fever of Scriven skulls which she had seen in London, but more likely it was the remains of a nightwight. Perhaps this was how they buried their dead.

The stale air in the passage stirred, bringing an unpleasant smell to her, and a faint noise, like the far-off muttering of many voices. They moved on slowly, Cluny with the gun up to her shoulder, Fever switching the torch on at briefer and briefer intervals, lightning-blinks just long enough to reassure them that they were not about to step into an abyss. The sound ahead grew louder. It was definitely the sound of voices, mingled with shuffling movement. The passage twisted, plunging downhill more steeply. Now, even between torch-glimpses, Fever could still make out the rocky roof, illuminated by the faintest, pale grey light.

“Daylight,” said Cluny, in the softest whisper. “We must’ve come clean through the hill. . .”

They turned a corner, and looked out over a broad gallery, hollowed by miners in some lost time, with a rugged pillar left in the centre of it to hold up the roof. It was full of nightwights.

“A dozen?” hissed Cluny accusingly. “There must be fifty of them!” Then she went quiet, for fear the nightwights would hear her. But they didn’t. The cavern was too full of the scratch and hiss of their own voices. She hunkered down, pulling Fever with her, and there they waited for what seemed an age, afraid to move again in case their movements drew the nightwight’s dark-adapted eyes, wondering what to do next, suspecting that they could do nothing.
There are too many of them
, Fever thought.
Too many
. . .

The ledge where they crouched was raised six or seven feet above the level of the cavern floor. Opposite it, perhaps fifty feet away, there was an opening like a long window in the rocky wall. The ghost-light of the pre-dawn sky seeped in there, filling the cavern with a grainy dusk. Even that was too much for the nightwights, who were shielding their eyes with their hands as if they feared the dingy light would blind them. Some were carrying horrid totems made of bone and hair; some wore headdresses of buzzards’ wings. All were gesturing at the window, lowing and grunting and mumbling.
Religion
, Fever thought disgustedly.
They have forgotten all the things that made them human, but they still cling to religion. They are making ready to worship the sun when it rises
. . . Yet the window faced north, not east. She could see the distant red embers of volcanoes out there on the far horizon, and closer, in the centre of the view, sharp and black against the mists that lifted from the valleys, the pyramid at Skrevanastuut.

It is not the sun that they worship
, she thought.
It is the pyramid!

“Where’s Marten?” Cluny whispered.

“I don’t know,” breathed Fever. A certain sense of expectation in the cavern made her think that the ’wights were awaiting something, and that it might have something to do with the catch their hunters had made up on the hill. Despite the tales, the nightwights probably had few opportunities to capture human beings. Prisoners were rare, and rituals would surround their slaughter. . .

Cluny was whispering again, but too softly to hear, and after a moment Fever realized she was praying. She prayed too:
Please let him be alive. Please let him be all right
. But she knew that nobody was listening.

The light slowly increased. The outline of the far-off pyramid became sharper. Suddenly a chorus of shrieks broke out on the far side of the cavern. Cluny jerked with shock, and Fever actually cried out, terrified that the nightwights had seen them, but her voice was drowned in the noise from below. Strange tides were stirring that sea of filthy bodies. Another group of feathered priests was shoving its way towards the window, carrying a mysterious shape which turned out, as it passed beneath the place where Fever and Cluny crouched, to be Marten Morvish. The boy’s eyes stared out through his matted hair so fixed and unseeing that Fever was sure that he was dead. Then he blinked, and she understood that he had just sunk down into some hiding place very deep within himself where the nightwights could not reach him.

She felt Cluny tensing beside her. The light was growing steadily brighter, and she did not think the ’wights could bear it for much longer. Their ceremony was about to reach its climax. They clustered round poor Marten, reaching out grimy hands, wheedling and roaring, but the priests who carried him beat them back with clubs of mammoth bone. They dragged and fumbled him up on to the long rock sill beneath the window, where a figure dressed in a rattling vest of human vertebrae brandished a big, dull-edged knife, and then began to sharpen it, with awful scrapes and grating sounds, against the rock face beside him.

“Now!” whispered Cluny.

“But—” Fever started to say. She did not finish, for Cluny let off the arquebus with a sound like a slap round the eardrums and a spurt of sparks as fierce and ginger as a vixen.

They never knew if the shot hit anyone. It probably went into the ceiling. But the gun’s bark and its belch of light were enough to stun the nightwights, and while they were still reeling Cluny jumped down from the ledge, calling for Fever to follow, and started to run towards the window and the priests and Marten. She swung the arquebus like a club, clearing a path for herself through the panic she had made, until a nightwight wrenched it from her, and another caught her by the hair, but Fever was close behind her and she shone the torch into his eyes and then into the faces of those behind him and they fell back dazzled and screeling, shocked that anyone could command such brightness. Fever laughed, and found her fear was gone, obliterated by a kind of wild elation that she had not felt since she launched herself from the cliffs in Arlo’s air machine.

They came to Marten, who had already kicked his way free of the ’wights who held him and stood there looking dazed but ready, waiting for Cluny to tell him what they would do next. The nightwights were starting to recover from their surprise. Now that the dreadful torch was no longer shining in their eyes they could see that this was not an army attacking them, just two young women. The bone-clad priests urged them forward with hooting cries. While Cluny ran to her brother’s side, Fever turned to face them, pointing the torch.

The nightwights stopped, but it was not the light that stopped them; the battery was failing, and the torch beam was no brighter now than the gathering daylight that flooded through the window behind her. They were staring at Fever. There was a look in their faces that she could not read, and something else; a sort of echo of a face she knew. Her own, or maybe Wavey’s. Those wide cheekbones like spread wings; those too-big eyes set too far apart. The nightwights saw it too, that whisper of resemblance. It made them hesitate and wonder.

“Fever!” shouted Cluny, standing on the window’s brink, hand-in-hand with Marten. Fever left the nightwights to their gawping and went to join her, wondering why she did not just run outside into the light. When she reached her, she understood. Instead of the gentle slopes she had imagined, the window opened on to a sheer drop; fifty or sixty feet into the dark waters of a river.

“Jump!” said Cluny.

“No,” said Fever. “We don’t know how deep that water is. . .”

“Who cares?” shouted Marten.

“Wait!” said Fever. “If our average weight is around eight stone, and we accelerate at . . . well, if U = mgh where U is our potential gravitational energy and m is our altitude, we should hit the water at a velocity of, er, so the depth of the water will need to be at least . . .”

“Fever, sometimes you just have to
jump
!” screamed Cluny, shoving her forward, and there was a long moment of nothing but her panicked heartbeat and the whoosh of the air rushing past her ears at approximately thirty-two feet per second and a scream that might have been Cluny or Marten or some angry nightwight far above, complaining at being cheated of its breakfast.

Then the water took them, dissipating some of that gravitational energy in a rackety splash and a burst of white spray, and they went down deep beneath it, but not quite deep enough to do more than bump their feet against the smooth black rocks which slept beneath the surface. As they rose the current took hold of them, and the river carried them swiftly around a spur of the hills and the nightwight lair was lost behind them.
We did it, we did it
, thought Fever, elated, joyful, and then, as the water closed over her head again,
Now, I suppose we shall drown
. . .