Fever Crumb Part 5

Bagman nodded, and gave him a thumbs-up. Inside his chest his lungs rustled like two brown paper bags being blown up. Charley didn't wait for the next fit of coughing, but fled down the stairs to the street door and out onto Ketch Causeway, b.u.t.toning his coat as he went.

Bagman hadn't given him any money, but he guessed the Skinner's name was good for credit at any shop in the low city.

He crossed Ditch Street and ran round to the market on St Kylie Hill. The stallholders there knew him, and to his surprise they already knew about his change of luck. "You're with Master Creech now, ain't you, Charley? Give him my compliments, son. Any luck finding that Patchskin girl yet?"

"We're working on it," Charley promised. He picked out six-eggs and a slab of b.u.t.ter, and they waved away any talk of payment. "Bagman Creech don't need to pay. 'Specially not in troubled times like these ..."

Charley wasn't certain what that last bit meant. Then, walking home, he started noticing the clumps of people who stood gossiping on the street corners. Curious, he followed a gang of 'prentices into Celebrity Square, which he found to be full of men in the uniforms of the Trained Bands -- thick coats of russet felt with white facings and black leather helmets. Two quartermasters stood in the back of a wagon, handing down arquebuses and pouches of powder and shot.

A big red fist seized him by his coat collar and spun him around. There stood Ted Swiney, his breath smoking in the chilly morning air. He'd come through from the Mott and Hoople to see the muster, and spotted Charley Shallow instead.

"Well?" he said.

"Well what, Ted?"

Ted shook him briefly. "I told you to keep me informed, din't I? So what have you been playing at?"

"I couldn't get away, Ted, honest ..."

Ted noticed that people were watching and let go of his grip on Charley's coat. He smoothed the crumpled fabric and grinned, as if he'd only been teasing. "So what's old Bagman turned up? Anything more about that Patchskin girl?"

Charley was shaking so badly that he dropped one of his eggs. It broke on the cobbles between his feet with a sound like a tiny clap. "Master Creech ain't even sure she is a Patchskin. He's still investigating."

Ted growled, looking past Charley at the militia men. A drum had started to rattle, and there was a lot of shouting and confusion as the part-time soldiers tried to form up in battalions. Some heavy horses, commandeered from a dairy in St Kylie, trotted past pulling a cannon. "Well, you tell Bagman he'd better hurry up," Ted said. "Our boys are off to guard the Moatway, in case those Movement numpties try breaking through. They don't want to think there's a Patchskin on the loose at home, menacing their womenfolk and nippers. They want to see it sorted."

"But if she ain't a Scriven, Ted ...

"Who gives a blog? Kill her anyway. You can always paint some speckles on her afterward. It'll cheer people up. Tell you what, once you've offed her, I'll have the skin. Look good on the wall behind the bar, a Scriven skin would."

"I don't think Master Creech would like that, Ted."

"Who cares what Master Creech thinks? I'm running this show, Charley. You bring me the skin. Think what a boost it'll be for our brave lads." And he sent Charley on his way with a friendly pat on the head and called out to some pa.s.sersby, "My boy. We're helping Creechey out. Don't worry, we'll soon have that Patchskin caught and butchered."

Charley ran all the way back to Ketch Causeway. He didn't tell Bagman about his meeting with Ted, but he thought he ought to hear about the Trained Bands mustering. The sound of drum and fife came faintly from the streets outside while he breathlessly explained the news.

Bagman Creech just shrugged. He had news of his own. "I been thinkin', Charley ..."

The desk, the bed, and the floor of Bagman's bedroom were covered with open books and spread-out papers. There was a big, yellowed map with red crosses marking all the places where Scriven had been found and killed in the years since the riot. Bagman stabbed his finger down onto a little cl.u.s.ter of crosses out in the Brick Marsh, southeast of the city.

"I checked the records, the notes the old Skinners made. There's things that don't add up; Scriven we had cornered at the Barbican during the riot who vanished and turned up weeks later, holed up in G.o.dshawk's old gaff out on the marshes. I never caught on at the time, but there must be a pa.s.sage, a tunnel of some sort. Linking Ludgate Hill with his old house. I reckon that's where Solent's doing his real digging. We need to get down there, see what he's found, and how the girl's involved."

Charley looked down at the bag in his hands. The five eggs and the b.u.t.ter. "What about breakfast, Master Creech?"

"No time, Charley. A bite of toast, maybe, a mug of tea to set us up. We'll save your eggs for later. For a victory feast."

Chapter 14 Skinners in the Brick Marsh.

That day, although the long walk through the tunnels was the same, the chamber and the vault door seemed changed. They felt too familiar to be places that Fever had seen only once. She remembered a cracked flagstone three paces from the door, and held her lantern up to look for it, and there it was, although she was sure she had not noticed it the day before, because it lay in the shadow cast by the toolbox. So how had she known?

She was starting to feel scared. She wished Dr. Crumb was there. She missed his calm, careful way of getting to the bottom of mysteries. Without him she felt panicky and very young.

"Are you sure it would not be better to send word to G.o.dshawk's Head?" she asked meekly. "Perhaps a more experienced Engineer ..."

'Try the door," said Kit, and held his lantern up to light the lock.

Weird feelings of deja vu flooded through Fever. Memories of yesterday mingled with memories of other yesterdays that could not possibly be her own. Pain was beating again at the base of her skull. She began to wonder if she were still inside her dream, if she climbed the stairs again and went outside, would there be lights in the unbroken windows of Nonesuch House? Would the float lanterns be rising still above the ornamental ponds, pink as blushes, gold as harvest moons?

She forced her eyes to turn toward the line of keys set in the door frame, and suddenly, as if one of those G.o.ds in whom Engineers did not believe had just whispered it in her ear, she knew the code.

They were pus.h.i.+ng through the marshes south of 'Bankmentside, following one of the old causeways through the birch woods and diggers' heaps and the ruins of drowned boroughs. Bagman had commandeered a coracle, a marshman's little wicker and tar-cloth boat, and Charley carried it upended on his shoulders, blundering along behind his master like a black beetle.

"Where is this place we're going?" he asked.

"G.o.dshawk's gaff," said Bagman Creech, scanning the drifting mist ahead for hints of trouble. "His summer palace in the Marsh."

"I heard of G.o.dshawk. He was King of the Patchskins, weren't he?"

"He was at the end. He didn't want to be. The Scriven elected him King thinking he'd save them, but they were past saving by then. G.o.dshawk was an inventor, mostly. Forever tinkering and fiddlearsing with the old technology, the way some Scriven did. They said there was a laboratory under that summer place of his where he did experiments on dead people and stuff. Though I never saw it for myself."

"You were there?"

Bagman Creech nodded. "The place got overlooked in the Riots, but a couple of weeks later we got word that some escaped Scriven had holed up there. Me and some of the lads got together and came out here. We followed this very path you're walking now, boy."

Charley tried to feel suitably awed, and told himself that he was walking on history, but mostly it still felt as if he were walking on porridge. The wood of the causeway was rotted and slimy, and the coracle on his back made him clumsy. Several times he almost fell, and at last Bagman called a halt. They left the path and squatted in the angle between two old walls, eating a bath bun and wiping the sugar and crumbs from their mouths on the sleeves of their coats. Bagman lit his pipe, and the smoke went up to mingle with the mist, and his memory went homing back to that day on this same path, long ago.

"When we got to G.o.dshawk's gaff we found they'd cut the causeway and we had to wade the last bit. A slough of water, shoulder deep, with G.o.dshawk's gardens rising up out of it ahead. Croquet hoops still stuck in the lawns. I was in the lead, halfway across, when all of a sudden these things started jumping up out of the water all around us. Wet and s.h.i.+ny they was, like black snakes, jumping straight up. I didn't know what was happening till the bloke on my right got hit, and then the bloke on my left, and I realized there were bullets coming down all around us. There were Scriven hiding in G.o.dshawk's gardens, shooting at us with hunting guns."

"What did you do, Master Creech?"

"I ducked, didn't I?" Bagman fingered a half-moon nick in the brim of his bowler where a bullet had taken a bite. "It was all I could do. Went down quick, like I'd been shot. Ducked right under the water so that only my hat was left, floating on the surface. At least, that's how it would have looked to the Scriven. Only what they couldn't see was that I'd got my face poking up inside the hat so's I could breathe. I stayed like that for hours."

"And the other men?"

"All dead, son. There was one just wounded -- Billy Kite, from -- I could hear him yelling out for help. But the Scriven kept banging their guns at him and after a while they must have hit him again, 'cos he shut up. And there I stood, up to my nose in marsh mud, hiding in my own hat till sundown. And then I pushed on."

"Didn't you want to go back? Run away?"

"Course I did. I was half frozen and two-thirds drowned. But I had work to do, didn't I? So I pressed on till I reached G.o.dshawk's garden, and I reckon the Scriven weren't expecting me, because they hadn't set much of a guard. I climbed out of the marsh looking like a part of the marsh, and I went creeping through them gardens and up to that house and I did what was needful. That's the good thing about a spring gun. There's no powder to get wet, so a soaking won't harm it much."

"You killed them?"

Bagman Creech nodded. "I was pretty sick of killing Scriven by then, mind. It didn't feel like a big victory. It weren't rock 'n' roll, the way the Riots was. It was just this nasty job I had to do. And when it was done I lit the place on fire, and the flames went way up high because it was full of smart furnis.h.i.+ngs and tapestries and stuff. And the light of all that burning was enough for me to find my way back home to London by."

"And was G.o.dshawk there?" asked Charley. "Was he one of the ones you killed?"

"No, he was dead by then. Killed in the Barbican, third day of the riots. Gnasher Modbury's crew caught him. 'You can't kill me,' that's what he told them. Stood and laughed at them. He wasn't short of courage. But they killed him all right. Later there were stories that he'd tricked them somehow and escaped, but I saw his speckled hide with me own eyes. He's dead all right."

They moved on, and soon the need for the coracle became clear. The causeway they were following stopped short, as if it had been bitten off. A stretch of gla.s.sy water spread itself before them, filled with clumps of reeds and drifting litter and the reflection of a strange, stepped hill that rose up ahead, with overgrown gardens around its feet and a crown of old walls. Charley scrambled through the thick mud at the water's edge and set the coracle afloat. As he helped Bagman in, the vessel wobbled, and beads of water swelled along a badly sealed join, but it floated, and Charley scrambled in as well and uns.h.i.+pped the paddle that was lashed under the seat.

Ahead, the hill was silent. The ruins blanched and faded as the mist blew past them. It was hard to imagine that there was anyone there, let alone Kit Solent and his tame Scriven, or whatever she was. Charley wondered what would happen if they found nothing. He didn't know if he'd be disappointed or relieved.

And she knew the code. She stood there frozen, her fingers raised in front of the lock's keys, and just as surely as she knew that she was Fever Crumb, she knew that if she pressed the numbers 2519364085 in sequence, the door would slide up into the roof, and the door behind it would slide to the right, and the door behind that would slide to the left. The counterweights that moved the heavy doors would rattle, and the gears would make a noise like big dogs growling.

"Go on," said Kit, softly and kindly, but with something steely *hard beneath the kindness, an eagerness she had not heard before. "You know it, Fever, don't you? Open the door!"

Outlandish visions burst in Fever's brain. Battles and b.a.l.l.s and s.h.i.+ps at sea and Dr. Crumb kneeling before her on a tiled floor and a woman she knew but didn't know laughing in sunlight and the pools and lanterns and -- "Open it!" shouted Kit Solent.

Fever fled. She stumbled sideways, kicking the lantern over so that it went out, but she found her way easily through the darkness and her hand closed on the familiar ivory handle of the door that led outside. Outside, she thought. Fresh air. She could hear Kit behind her, calling out "Fever!" Up the stairs she went, and out through the door in the hillside, into mist.

"Fever!" Kit Solent was calling, down inside the hollow hill. "Fever, come back! It's all right! I didn't mean to shout!"

Fever still felt groggy, but she forced herself to move away from the door and climb the hill, going up from terrace to terrace the way she had the day before. She wanted to find somewhere where she could sit quietly alone for a while and think. What was happening to her? Was she ill? Was she going mad?

On the top of the hill the mist moved among old, burned timbers, between the fallen walls. Something splashed in the marshes -- a bird, Fever guessed. She walked through the roofless, ruined rooms and found she knew them. This one had been carpeted; this one had been tiled. In this corner had stood a fine teak bookcase, gla.s.s-fronted, whose silver handles she uncovered with a bit of scrabbling, little dirty blobs of pooled metal buried in gra.s.s and clinker underfoot.

I must have been here before, she reasoned. I must have been here when I was a tiny child. But she knew that she could not have been more than a few months old when Nonesuch House burned. Surely a child that tiny would not know what a bookcase was, let alone remember it?

Along the hall she walked, through the arch where the grand front door had been, out onto the gravel drive, gone all to moss and nettles now, where the guests used to leave their sedan chairs. She hummed a dance tune from twenty years before, and it stirred up fresh memories. The ghosts of Scriven dancers moved around her, shadowy, the great dresses of the women rustling and sighing. But they were not real. They were in her head. It's not the house that's haunted, she thought. It's me ....

There, across the lawn, was the dear old summer house, its roof fallen in now, its walls thick-grown with ivy.... She walked toward it, and remembered walking toward it one warm evening, with music spilling from the house behind her and ahead of her in the night, a soft laugh, a sigh...

She stopped short, clutching her head, wincing at the pain that hammered there. When she opened her eyes again a boat had drawn up at the foot of the hill, and a man and a boy were climbing the overgrown lawns. For a moment, confused, Fever thought they were guests arriving late for the party. She started downhill to greet them, then realized her mistake. She would never have invited such a shabby pair to one of her parties....

It was the old man from Summertown and his ragged boy.

"Master Creech!" the boy shouted, looking up and seeing her standing there.

The old man came straight for her, and his pale eyes were s.h.i.+ning, fixed upon her face. He stopped ten feet from her, facing her across one of the ponds. "What are you?" he asked again, in a hoa.r.s.e voice. " Who are you?"

"I'm not sure," said Fever.

The boy came panting up the hill behind him, and stopped, and they stood side by side, staring at Fever.

"Lily Dismas was right," said the old man, more to himself than the boy. "Whatever she is, she ain't proper human."

Something hot touched Fever's lips. She tasted redness, put up a hand to her mouth, and took it away smeared with blood. Her nose was bleeding again. "Sorry," she mumbled, reaching for her handkerchief. When she looked at the old man again he had taken out a spindly gun and he was pointing it at her.

"This ain't personal," he said. "It's my reckoning that you must be some kind of Scriven half-breed, so I'm doing what's needful for the good of London and the human race...."

But the cough which had been building up inside Bagman Creech's chest while he was speaking burst out of him as he pulled the spring gun's trigger. He doubled over, blue-faced, hacking. The bolt whirred past Fever's cheek like a May bug and the sound seemed to jar something loose in her. She turned and started running.

Chapter 15 Hunting Fever.

Master Creech!" shouted Charley, as the girl spun about and set off into the mist. The old man was folded over, choking. He held one hand out, waggling the gun at Charley. "Get her, lad!" he managed to gasp, before another fit of coughing started.

Charley s.n.a.t.c.hed the gun and hared after the girl. She was a white blob in the mist, turning a corner of the ruined house. He ran after her, and saw her bounding away from him down the steep terraces of the hillside, her arms outstretched for balance. As he started down his feet went from under him on the wet gra.s.s and he fell and slid, but he kept hold of Bagman's gun.

Halfway down the hill Fever stopped, lost, looking for the door. Mist hung in the bushes. The door was nowhere. Maybe she had come down the wrong side of the hill. "Help!" she shouted. But she doubted Kit could hear her. The boy was already scrambling down behind her, cras.h.i.+ng through wet branches.

She ran on, plunging into the thick growth of scrub and alders that broke along the hill's foot like green surf.

And Charley followed her. He was Bagman's boy, and he wasn't going to lose sight of her. In among those trees the mist was thick and the light was dim, but the girl's white coat still showed, bobbing ahead of him. He was faster than her. He got closer, and saw that she was crossing a patch of green moss beyond some tall reeds up ahead. She glanced back at him, and she looked young and pretty and human. He wasn't sure he had it in him to shoot her with the spring gun, even if she was what Bagman had said she was. But he couldn't let the old man down.

He looked behind him, but there was no sign of the Skinner. He plunged through the reeds. The girl was on the far side of the moss, where birches in their ragged silver wrappers stood in the mist like wands. Following her, he slithered down a short, steep stair of tree roots and plunged into cold mud. That was why the girl had taken her time crossing; she had picked her way along the top of an old drowned wall that Charley in his hurry hadn't even seen. The moss he had stepped out onto was just a green rug laid over a pit brimful of watery stuff like cold, black soup.

It didn't suck him down like quicksand in a story; he simply sank, his mouth and nostrils filling with mud as he went under.

His hands alone stayed above the surface, clutching the precious gun. He thought of Bagman, nose-deep in the lagoons, hiding under his hat.

And Fever, on the far bank, unsnagging her coat skirts from the brambles there and readying herself to run, stopped short, startled by his choked-off scream. Crossing the moss she had fully hoped that the boy would miss his footing and plunge in. It had been a stratagem, and she'd been proud of it: He had a gun, but she had reason. Now, as she listened to him blurt and founder, she could think only of the chill black water forcing its way into his lungs.

She turned. A hand rose from the water, holding aloft the dripping gun, which glimmered green and silver in the light that came through the leaves above. Somehow the boy got his head above the surface. She thought for a moment that he was going to point the gun at her, but he was sinking again, and he turned and threw the weapon onto the bank behind him as he went down. "Help!" he gasped.

What harm could he do her, unarmed and half drowned? He was a pasty little thing, younger even than her. She grabbed up a fallen branch and held it out toward him.

"Take this!" she shouted.

Charley went under again, drinking more mud. When he came up the girl was still holding the branch out.