Fever Crumb Part 2

"Ruan!" his father warned.

"Not at all," said Fever. "During the Scriven era there was a fas.h.i.+on for women to name their children after whatever ailments they suffered from while they were pregnant. I have heard of people named 'Backache,' 'Diarrhea' ..."

"I knew a man once called Craving-For-Pickled-Onions McNee," agreed Kit Solent. Ruan giggled, and Fever looked disapprovingly at his father. Was he joking? She didn't see the purpose of jokes.

The little girl, meanwhile, had decided that Fever was now safe to.talk to. She held out the toy dog to her and said, "His name's Noodle Poodle. He's three."

Fever was not sure how to reply to that. She turned to Kit Solent instead. "You have work for me, I believe? Dr. Stayling said that you have uncovered an Ancient site, and that you have asked for an Engineer to help you study the artifacts it contains."

Kit Solent took another slurp of tea and then sat back, lifting Fern onto his lap. He looked slightly embarra.s.sed. "I may have misled old Stayling slightly. The site that I've uncovered has not yielded any artifacts yet, but I believe it soon will. Until it does, I'm keen to keep it secret; I should hate one of the big archaeological combines to nip in and steal it from me."

Fever nodded. Archaeology in London was a cutthroat business, so it was rational that Kit Solent would wish to keep his find a secret. She said, "What is this site? An Ancient building?"

"Not exactly ... Kit looked wary. "I'll take you there, so you can see for yourself. But first we must wait for Mistress Gloomstove to arrive. Mistress Gloomstove is my housekeeper. She will take the children to school, and then we can go exploring."

Mistress Gloomstove arrived not long afterward; they heard her open the front door just as Fever was finis.h.i.+ng her hot water, and the children went scampering to meet her, Ruan telling her loudly about their new, bald-headed visitor. She emerged into the conservatory a moment later, weighed down by bags and shopping baskets, the children orbiting her like eager moons. A large, red-faced, breathless-looking woman in starched white ap.r.o.ns and an irrational hat, she looked suspiciously at Fever, and muttered, "Charmed, Miss, I'm sure," when Kit Solent introduced them.

"Fever will be staying," Kit told her, taking one of the baskets from her and nodding for Fern to take the other. "Will you make up a bed for her in the room on the top floor? The one that still has its ceiling all intact?"

"Of course, sir," said the woman meekly, with another look at Fever. She carried her bags through into a kitchen which opened off at the conservatory's farther end, and the children went after her with the baskets, Fern saying loudly, "... and I want all my hair cut off, because it gives you pastarites ... "

After that came five minutes of din and confusion while the children found their school things. "They attend Miss Wernicke's School for a few hours every day," explained Kit Solent through the noise. "It's a jolly place, just a single room above a tech shop on Endemol Street. Miss Wernicke teaches them reading and writing, drawing, singing, and so forth...."

Fever tried to look interested. She had not heard of Miss Wernicke's establishment. She did not think that Dr. Crumb would approve of it.

And then, at last, the children were gone; the house was quiet; she was alone with Kit Solent.

"There!" he said. "Now, Miss Crumb, I shall lead you to my excavation."

Fever followed him. To her surprise he did not take her back outside into the streets, but deeper into his house.

When she thought about it, it was not altogether strange. Ludgate Hill was not a natural hill, but the collapsed and compacted wreckage of a district of immense towers that had stood in this part of London in the twenty-first century. It was known to be honeycombed with diggers' tunnels, so it seemed quite possible that Kit Solent might have stumbled across some cache of wonders beneath his own floor.

They came to a dead end, a corridor that stopped at a large mahogany bookcase, the shelves crammed with worthless novels. Kit Solent walked straight to it, and reached up to press a stud concealed in a swag of ornamental carving. Behind the rows of books, machinery grumbled like a tetchy librarian, and the whole case slid sideways into a deep recess in the wall.

"A secret pa.s.sage," he said, looking expectantly at Fever, certain she must be excited by such a romantic thing. "Rather a cliche, I'm afraid ..."

"Ingenious," said Fever, allowing herself to raise one eyebrow just a quarter of an inch. "Operated by a system of pulleys and counterweights, I presume."

They stepped through the gap where the bookcase had stood and it rumbled back into place behind them while they went down ten steps into a windowless, whitewashed chamber. It had the feel of underground, that damp brown smell. There was one door, a very small one, opposite the foot of the steps. Lanterns were ranged along a stone shelf.

Fever wondered suddenly if she were entirely safe in this strange place, with this strange man. But she could see no way now of turning back. Solent handed her a lantern, and used his tinderbox to light it before lighting another for himself. Then he opened the narrow door.

It revealed a dark opening, a man-high pa.s.sage sh.o.r.ed with timber balks. Stale air came out at them, and along with the sound of water trickling somewhere far below, and a wet, raw-dough smell of secret places deep beneath the city.

Chapter 7 Under London.

There was a tunnel beneath the house. She squeezed after Kit Solent along the narrow, wood-walled pa.s.sage which looked as if he had dug it himself, and after a few yards they emerged into a much broader, older working. The prints of his boots were stamped in the damp earth underfoot, as if he had come and gone along it many times.

"Not scared of the dark, I hope?" he asked cheerfully. "Of course not!" said Fever. What did he take her for? Another of his children? But she walked a little faster, all the same. It was very cold in the tunnel. The light from their two lanterns lit up the low brick roof and the timber b.u.t.tressing which lined the walls. Before long the timber gave way to rusty metal, ribbed like the throat of a whale and slick with moisture. Not so much a tunnel as an enormous pipe.

"This pa.s.sageway was dug by Auric G.o.dshawk, I believe," said Kit Solent. "It linked the Barbican with a house he owned outside the city. The Barbican end of it is all filled in now. Katie and I heard rumors about it years ago. Then, two summers back, there was a cave-in in one of the streets higher up the hill. A section of pavement collapsed into what people thought was just an old digger's working. The hole was filled in, but I guessed at once that it was G.o.dshawk's tunnel, and I worked out the likely course it took beneath the city. I took the house in Ludgate Hill Gardens because its cellar was as close as I could get to the line of the old tunnel. Then it was just a question of digging until I hit it. The tunnel itself was in pretty good repair; just a few roof-falls to deal with, a few leaks to plug."

"How far does it go?" asked Fever, peering into the darkness ahead.

"About two miles. I hope you're feeling fit...."

Two miles, thought Fever. That would put their destination well outside the southern edge of London, deep in the Brick Marsh.

"Does anyone else know about it?" she asked.

"No," Kit replied. "G.o.dshawk had the laborers who built it put to death, and any of his Scriven friends who knew about it were murdered in the Skinners' Riots. You're honored, Fever. Apart from me, you're the only person in London who knows this is here."

For some unreasonable reason, that made Fever uneasy. As they walked on she began to feel more and more aware of the darkness that was pressing in behind her. She looked back once or twice and saw it flooding after her along the tunnel, repossessing the places that her pa.s.sing lamp had briefly lit. She remembered accounts that she had read about the "London under London"; a midnight maze of tunnels dug by generations of scavenger archaeologists, linking up in places with far older networks, the winding processional Deepways of the Raffia Hat Culture, and even sections of the Ancient underground system. There were tales of blind, white savages living in the deepest shafts, the descendants of people who had sought shelter there from the Downsizing and never found their way out.

Fever did not believe such yarns, of course. But each time a stone fell in the dark behind her she started, and walked a little faster, anxious not to be left behind.

After a long while the tunnel started to rise, and they stepped through a doorway into a big underground s.p.a.ce. It was brick-built, this place, and flagstone-floored, like the deep cellar of some important old building. There was a toolbox standing in the middle of the floor, along with some spare lanterns and an oil-stained rag or two. In the far wall a big steel door was set. Around the edges, where it met the heavy door frame, bright scars and gouges showed where someone had tried, with a variety of tools, to prise it open.

"Impressive, eh?" said Kit Solent, holding his lantern up to light Fever's face and watching her reactions as she studied the strange door. "I've been trying for months to get that open. I finally got a drill through it, but it looks as if there's another door behind it and likely a third behind that, and they're all reinforced and made of something that grinds my drill bits flat in no time."

Fever glanced quickly around the underground chamber. It was empty except for Kit's tools and lamps and that great steel portal, like the door to a colossal safe. "What's in there?" she asked.

"I'm not entirely sure," said Solent, with a shrug that made the lantern light shrug, too. "But the old villain must have been keeping s omething in there to make it worth erecting such a door."

Fever looked at him. He was still watching her. "This was G.o.dshawk's?"

Kit Solent nodded. "Look closer. Please."

Fever was surprised to be asked. She put down her lantern and went over to the door. She saw the places where drills had gnawed at the metal. Otherwise, it was in good condition, unrusted and undented, s.h.i.+ning coldly in the lamplight. It was not new, but nor was it very old. There were no handles or hinges, so she guessed that it was meant to slide open. On the heavy frame to the right of the door, on the same level as her eyes, she saw a row of ivory studs or b.u.t.tons, each printed with a single number.

"'Lectronics?" she said to herself. She had heard of 'lectronic locks, but never seen one. They were deep old-tech. No one nowadays knew how to create the minute chips and circuits which controlled such a device, so to make one you needed a piece of Ancient technology which still worked, and such treasures were rare and wildly valuable....

She turned, and found Kit Solent watching her with an expression she did not know how to read. It looked almost as if he were afraid of her. "This is a 'lectronic keypad, Master Solent," she said awkwardly. "You would have to know the code. Without it, I don't see any way of opening this door, if you keep drilling at it you might damage it. You might make it impossible to open even with the code."

"And what is the code, Fever?" Solent asked.

It was an absurd question. But strangely, it did not feel absurd. For a second, Fever actually thought about it, as if she might know, while Kit Solent watched her steadily with his eyes s.h.i.+ning in the light from the lanterns. Then the moment pa.s.sed; he laughed and said, "Come, let's get some fresh air, and I'll explain."

There was another door in that underground room, so small and ordinary that Fever had not noticed it. It was made from planks of wood, and its handle was a worn ivory egg that seemed to her peculiarly familiar.

Kit Solent turned the handle and opened the door, and held it for Fever to go through, then followed her up a long wind of brick stairs with Fever's shadow, cast by the light of his lantern, laid up them like a carpet.

"Can you guess what lies behind that door that we have been trying to open, Fever?"

"No, Master Solent."

"It is a workroom. It is G.o.dshawk's room, where he worked on his secret inventions. It was a secret itself, even during the rule of the Scriven."

"G.o.dshawk ... said Fever, and for some reason she imagined a low, unwindowed room ribbed with stone b.u.t.tresses, and bra.s.s lamps shaped like lilies hanging from the roof. "I did not know G.o.dshawk was an inventor. I thought he was insane...."

"He was a Scriven. They were all insane, judged by our human standards. But they loved tinkering with the old machines, and making new ones. Your Order never approved. The Scriven were too playful, not scientific enough. Perhaps to them engineering was a sort of art. And Auric G.o.dshawk was a very great artist indeed."

They came to the stairs' top, and another door. This one of metal, sealed with immense bolts. They were old and rust-stained but they had been recently oiled, and Fever slid them open and leaned against the door and was dazzled by daylight. She stepped out into long, wet gra.s.s. The door was set into the side of a low, squarish hill, and almost hidden by evergreen shrubs that someone must have planted all around it. Pus.h.i.+ng her way out through their wet needles, Fever turned and s.h.i.+elded her eyes against the brightness of the day and looked about, trying to understand where she was. Up on the hill's top stood the stubs and shards of a ruined building. Around the base of the hill the sun shone wanly on the waters of the Brick Marsh, formed during the earth-storms of the previous century when the old river Thames had changed its course and spilled away southward, drowning London's southern boroughs in a wide wilderness of reed beds, wetlands, and lagoons.

Kit propped the door ajar and started to climb up the hill's side, and Fever followed.

"G.o.dshawk built his home on this hill," said Solent. "It was called Nonesuch House. Long before the Scriven chose him as their leader, he had his villa here. Even then, when he had his royal apartments in the Barbican, this was always the place he loved the best."

The hill went up in gra.s.sy terraces, a green ziggurat. They pa.s.sed fallen statues flocked with moss, and skirted strange, shallow pools. At the top stood what remained of Nonesuch House. Fire-scorched jagged crusts of wall, a ma.s.s of charred timber, and smashed rooftiles and tangled weeds filling the s.p.a.ces between them. A blackbird clattering in a bramble bush. But Fever, as she looked in through the empty windows, saw Scriven n.o.bles in evening robes and their women in gowns like vast, blowsy flowers, crowding the big rooms, spilling out onto the lawns to watch glowing paper lanterns loft into the air. She shut her eyes and forced the vision away. What was wrong with her today?

"It is very unfas.h.i.+onable now to say that the Scriven created anything of worth," said Kit Solent. He picked up a shard of floortile, looked at it, and let it fall. "And it's true that most of the things G.o.dshawk tried to invent were crazy -- new colors, flying machines, devices for recording dreams. He spent most of his spare time tinkering with Stalkers' brains. He dissected the last of the Scriven's Stalker warriors in the course of his researches, which is one of the reasons they could not defend themselves when the riots began. But he worked on other things as well, and I believe that one of them still exists, buried in that vault down there beneath us."

Fever turned around, taking in the view and trying to ignore the strange feelings that the place aroused in her. Feelings mean nothing. Stop feeling and think.... A wash of sunlight silvered the far-off roofs of Ludgate Hill. "I am surprised that no one has found this place before," she said.

"The causeway which linked this hill to London has been cut," said Solent. 'The way across the lagoons is hazardous. The vault was a secret even in G.o.dshawk's day. No one knows that it is here. And the door in the hillside was completely overgrown; I could never have found it from outside."

"So how did you learn of it?"

"Stories. Rumors."

"It seems irrational to buy a house and dig a tunnel simply because of stories...."

"But I found the vault, didn't I?" said Kit Solent triumphantly. "Now it is just a question of getting inside. Of course, I could announce my discovery -- I know people who would be happy to take the top off this hill and use brute force and gunpowder to get into G.o.dshawk's inner sanctum. But I don't like such methods. I want to try a subtler approach. And I think you can help me, Fever Crumb."

Chapter 8 Skinner's boy.

Too shy to speak, Charley went silently after Bagman Creech through the busy Stragglemarket. He hung back, quiet and watchful, while the Skinner talked to some of the stallholders there, listening to their accounts of the strange-looking girl who had come their way that morning, and the sedan chair which some believed had smuggled her away.

"It was Bert @kinson's chair," said one man. "I'm surprised at him, aiding a dirty Patchskin like that."

"We have no proof that she was a Scriven," Bagman Creech reminded him. "That is for me to find out. And it was not the chairmen who aided her, but their pa.s.senger, the man who hired them." He glanced upward, judging the time by the way the sun hit the tops of the old warehouses above him. "I'll be taking a little refreshment at the Scary Monster. Pa.s.s word for this @kinson to come and find me there."

The Scary Monster and Supercreep was a big tavern halfway down Cripplegate. It was set back from the street, with tables arranged outside under a dim see-through canopy made from salvaged plastic. It wasn't the cla.s.s of place where Charley thought he would be welcome, but Bagman Creech looked back at him and jerked his head to show that Charley should come with him. They sat down together at one of the tables and studied each other in the brownish light that came through the plastic roof.

"You look hungry, boy," said Bagman Creech. "Ted Swiney given you any breakfast today?"

Ted Swiney hadn't, but Charley wasn't going to admit it, in case word of his disloyalty got back to the publican. "I'm all right, Master Creech," he said.

A soft cough rumbled like far-off thunder down behind the Skinner's ribs. He blinked his pale eyes at Charley. "I remember being mostly hungry when I was a boy."

Charley, caught off-balance by the sudden notion that Bagman Creech had once been a boy, said, "That must have been a long time ago, Master Creech."

Bagman Creech started to laugh, and kept on laughing until the laugh turned into a long choking spasm. He retched like a cat with a furball and coughed up a big, blood-veined pearl of phlegm, which he spat onto the flagstones under the table. "It was that, Charley," he whispered hoa.r.s.ely, wiping his eyes with his s.h.i.+rt cuffs. "It was a long, long time ago. And food was scarce for normal folks in them days, for the Scriven ruled this town, and took all the good things for themselves and their cronies. And that's why I was mostly hungry, then."

Meanwhile, the serving girls, looking like white hens in their crisp ap.r.o.ns and bonnets, had been gathering at the tavern door to gawp at their famous guest and whisper about who would take his order. (" You go, Gertie." "No, you go!") Now their mistress, the Scary Monster's fat landlady, shoved her way between them and hurried to Bagman's side to curtsey and twitter.

"Oh, Master Creech, this is an honor, how can we serve you, good Master Creech?"

"Well, Mistress," said Bagman Creech, "I'll take a mug of your porter, and a stack of pancakes for my young a.s.sistant here."

"Oh, yes, sir," fluttered the landlady, looking at Charley in a way no one had ever looked at him before, as if he meant something.

"And honey!" called Bagman Creech, as she hurried off. "Plenty of honey." He looked at Charley again, and smiled. His lean old face was so unused to smiling that Charley was afraid it might crack and drop off his bones like plaster off a wall. He had long teeth, scuffed and yellowed as the keys of a pub piano. "Pancakes was my favorite, as I recall," he said. "Honey pancakes 'specially."

"Thank you, Master Creech," said Charley, whose mouth was watering at just the thought of pancakes.

The old man shrugged. "I generally work alone," he said. "But...Well, Ted Swiney's a bad man, but there's truth in what he said. Maybe it is time I had a youngster to help me out. How old are you, Charley?"

"Eleven, Master Creech. Maybe twelve."

"Old enough, then. Got a mum and dad, have you?"

Charley shook his head. For as long as he could remember, he'd just hung around the Mott and Hoople, sleeping in the cellar or the yard out back, doing odd jobs for Ted Swiney, eating what sc.r.a.ps he could find. Probably his mother had been one of Ted's servant girls, but he didn't remember her. Who his dad was, only the G.o.ds of London knew.

Bagman Creech coughed thoughtfully. "And you wouldn't be too brokenhearted, I'm guessing, if you never had to go back to Ted Swiney's employ?"

"Oh, no, Master Creech!"

'"Cos I'm like you, Charley, all alone. And it seems to me that maybe it's time I started training up some young fellow to take over my job, when I'm too old to do it anymore. How would you like that, Charley? To sign on as my 'prentice?"

"What, and hunt Patchskins, Master Creech? I don't think I'd be brave enough."

"I didn't think I'd be brave enough, Charley, when I was your tender age. But the time comes when you just have to do what's needful."