Fever Crumb Part 8

"You wouldn't dare!" she said, but she didn't sound at all certain about it.

"No!" said Gideon. (Was it really him speaking? It had to be; he could feel his mouth shaping the words, and see the breath smoldering in front of his face as he spoke them into the cold, still air.) "No! Come along, this isn't reasonable. You have nothing to gain by a.s.saulting this person. Do you think the Scriven won't send their mercenaries down here to take revenge, if you go any further in this foolishness?"

"Who's he?" asked a woman.

"No idea," said another.

"Engineer, by the look of him."

"Blog off, Scriven lover!" yelled a man in the stiff blue overalls of a plasticsmith, hefting a cobblestone ready to hurl at the Scriven. But he sounded half-hearted, as if even he could see the sense in what Gideon had said. The stone stayed in his hand, unthrown. Gideon walked past him toward the Scriven.

"Thank you," she said thinly, as he drew near to her. Some of the onlookers gasped and murmured. They had never heard a Scriven thank anyone before. She was trembling slightly. How old was she? She didn't look much more than twenty, but it was hard to tell with her kind. The joke in London was that if you wanted to know how old a Dapplejack was you had to cut them in half and count the rings.

She reached out and took Gideon by the arm before he could object. "You will lead me to the Barbican, Engineer," she said. She didn't have any idea where she was, he realized. Conveyed around London all her life by chair, she knew nothing of the layout of its streets. Whereas he, who had never been able to afford to travel except on foot, could easily get his bearings by glancing up at the temples and buildings whose spires he could see poking up behind the snowy rooftops.

A stone flew past him and smashed one of the chair windows. He felt the Scriven woman flinch at the sound of the gla.s.s shattering. He flinched, too, but he calmed himself by reciting pi and telling himself that he was doing the only reasonable thing. And, arm in arm with the Scriven, he walked up that street and back onto streets he knew, while behind them her would-be murderers contented themselves by making a bonfire of her abandoned chair and smas.h.i.+ng the fallen Stalker up for spare parts.

It was starting to snow again, or perhaps it was just the winter wind lifting flurries of powder snow from the roofs and chimney stacks. The small flakes settled like sequins in the tortoisesh.e.l.l fur of the Scriven's cape as she and Gideon walked past the lighted windows of exclusive restaurants and high-cla.s.s scent shops and boutiques until they reached the square in front of the Barbican. Despite the masonry which filled its wheel arches and the new spires and turrets which spoiled its timber upperworks, the old fortress clearly showed its origins as a huge vehicle -- a high-prowed s.h.i.+p of the steppes in which the Scriven had been dragged halfway across the world by their armies of slaves.

Gideon thought his companion might be interested to hear the latest news from the nomad empires, whose technomancers were now fitting engines to their traction fortresses, but just as he was about to mention it she let go his arm and turned to look at him.

Her eyes were the rich brown of expensive chocolate, with some unguessable emotion in them, and suddenly she laughed, and Gideon saw that she wore a metal brace on her teeth. It glittered in the light from the windows of the shops like a tiny railway track. So she wasn't perfect after all, or at least she must not think that she was perfect, if she had paid some dentist to attach all that careful engineering to her smile.

That was when he fell in love with her.

She asked his name before she left him and went up into the Barbican. He told her, but he was too startled by his own feelings to ask hers, or ask her what she had been doing in the back-streets of St Kylie all alone. Not until the next morning, when he read the front-page story in the Alarmist, did he learn that Wavey G.o.dshawk, daughter of Auric G.o.dshawk, had been waylaid in the low city when her malfunctioning Jaeger servant took a wrong turn, and that the Scriven's mercenaries had executed twenty Londoners by way of punishment.

Chapter 20 at Nonesuch house.

That brief confrontation in St Kylie, and the Patchwork king's spiteful response, would change the history of London forever. By the summer of that year few Scriven dared venture far beyond the expensive, well-lit streets that surrounded the Barbican. Those who did were slaughtered by the Skinners' Guilds. Brutish reprisals by G.o.dshawk's Suomi mercenaries seemed to have no effect beyond making the commons hate him even more.

But Gideon Crumb, safe in the Engineerium, barely noticed any of it. He had never taken an interest in politics and, except for that one morning after he walked Wavey G.o.dshawk home, he avoided newspapers, which everyone knew were unreasonable things, filled with scaremongering and the wildest rumors. He was busy with the study of ancient engines, which he hoped would win him his place as a fully fledged Engineer, and he had no more time for wandering the streets of London.

The only trouble was, he could not forget Wavey G.o.dshawk. At night in his bunk while he waited for sleep, when he should have been turning over ideas about torque and fuel efficiency in his mind, he kept being distracted by the image of her face, her smile, her way of speaking. Her voice had been soft but rather deep, he recalled. She had had very small hands. Her hair, or at least those strands of it which had escaped the hood of her cape, was tawny blond....

He told himself not to be so foolish, and forced himself to consider power-weight ratios until he fell asleep, but Wavey G.o.dshawk waited for him in his dreams. It was all most distracting, and almost enough to make him wonder if Dr. Stayling didn't have it right when he said that a good Engineer must purge himself of all emotions.

And then, on a September afternoon, when he was puzzling over books in the library, the sounds of uproar and disorder reached him, coming not from distant quarters of the city, as they had all summer, but from somewhere inside the Engineerium itself.

He closed the book he was reading and hurried out of the library. In the corridor which led to the Engineerium's main entrance, men in the gaudy jackets of G.o.dshawk's private militia were striding about with muskets among a lot of white-coated, kneeling Engineers. "Kneel!" one bellowed, seeing Gideon standing there staring, and Gideon knelt.

In through the main doors, as if she were solidifying out of a blaze of suns.h.i.+ne, came Wavey G.o.dshawk. The gown she wore was the most unreasonable thing ever seen in the Engineerium. Its skirts whispered along either wall as she pa.s.sed. Even Dr. Stayling, who had often declared that it was irrational and unreasonable to kneel before a Scriven, went down on his knees at the sight of her. Gideon, too embarra.s.sed to look at her face, looked at the floor instead. He heard her dress come whispering and sighing and hissing toward him, and then the creak of the huge wicker frame beneath her skirts as she stopped just a few inches away.

"I am here on behalf of His Excellency the Civic Commander Auric G.o.dshawk," she said, in that well-remembered voice. "He has sent me here to find an Engineer to be his a.s.sistant." She paused, and Gideon pictured her looking about at all the kneeling Engineers like a lady shopping for new gloves, until he felt her hand touch the back of his bowed head, light as a b.u.t.terfly.

"I think I'd like this one. Have him sent to Nonesuch House this afternoon."

There were a lot of men in the Order far better qualified than Gideon Crumb to serve as an a.s.sistant to the great Scriven inventor. Later, there would be all sorts of spiteful rumors about him. The unemotional Dr. Whyre grew quite angry that he had not been offered a chance to explore the mysteries of G.o.dshawk's laboratories, and stubbed his toe rather badly when he kicked his workbench in a fit of pique. But Gideon was never aware of that.

He must have spent the next few hours gathering his books and belongings, packing clean s.h.i.+rts and underwear, and traveling somehow to 'Bankmentside and out along the causeway. But when he thought back on it in after years, it seemed to him that he had gone straight from kneeling before Wavey G.o.dshawk in the Engineerium to kneeling before her father in the hallway of Nonesuch House, watching G.o.dshawk's slippers and the hems of G.o.dshawk's robes as the tyrant-inventor paced toward him. "Get up."

Gideon climbed to his feet, still too nervous to look directly at his new employer. He glimpsed peac.o.c.k-colored robes, a speckled hand gripping the handle of a steel cane, a lot of rings, a crisp white cuff. The voice said, "Why should you kneel to me, Londoner? There are thousands of your kind in this city, and barely two hundred of mine. The time of the Scriven will soon be over."

Gideon couldn't help but look up at that. Except for a strange, half-mocking smile, G.o.dshawk's face was the same face that Gideon remembered from a thousand wall posters, and from the immense statue which was being built in the west of the city. A long, angular face, leopard speckled, white-bearded, white-maned. The large, watchful eyes of a big and dangerous cat.

"I've shocked you, eh?" he said. "You've never heard one of the Scrivener's chosen people speak the truth about ourselves that way? Well, I'll go further. There is no Scrivener. There is no real difference between us and any other race of human beings. Our longevity, and these attractive marks of which we are so proud, are just minor genetic quirks. Fate has blessed us with robust const.i.tutions and an interesting skin complaint, and in every other way we are as human as you. We managed to grow powerful for a while, but we have not done much with that power. We played games, like children, imagining that the real business of our kind all lay ahead. Now playtime is nearly over, and we see that there is nothing more to come. That's why I must work fast, if I am to leave the world anything to remember us by. So I need an a.s.sistant. My daughter tells me that you did her a service once, and those fools at the Engineerium a.s.sure me you are clever."

"What would you have me do, sir?" asked Dr. Crumb, excited at the thought of working on one of the old Scriven's inventions.

But by way of answer, G.o.dshawk merely led him to a side room and flung the door open. It was a big room, and it was filled from side to side and floor to ceiling with old-tech. There were big pieces and small, well-preserved ones along with a few that were no more than hunks of rust.

"I need money, Crumb. I have a project in mind, and it must be funded, so I have decided to sell off my collection. This lot has been acquired over a lifetime, and I've had a long life. I can't remember what's in here myself, so I want you to catalogue it, and a.s.sess it as you go. Sort the trash from the treasures. Make notes, if you need anything, ask my daughter. I'll pop in from time to time and see how you're doing."

"I'll do my best, sir," said Gideon. But G.o.dshawk had already gone striding on his way.

Days went by. Weeks went by. Slowly, Gideon worked his way through the mountains of machinery, studying, describing, puzzling. Had this battered plastic frame been part of a TV set, or only a window? Could this crushed orange rubber ball really have hopped into s.p.a.ce, as its name suggested? He made drawings and notes in a circular ledger. He grew bored. He thought often of asking G.o.dshawk to release him from this work, which any half-trained scavenger could have done, and let him return to the Engineerium. But he never did. At the Engineerium he would not be near Wavey G.o.dshawk.

Wavey worked as her father's a.s.sistant. When she was in that role she wore her hair tied back and put on a white coat, tailored to spread over the wide bell of her skirts. Each afternoon she would come in and listen carefully while Gideon explained the more interesting pieces he had found and catalogued. She dropped in with questions and suggestions, always perfectly timed. She set him thinking. She challenged his a.s.sumptions. The Order had taught him that women were weak, unreasonable creatures, but Wavey was neither. The Scriven dapplings on her face and neck made chains of little V-shapes, like wild geese flying. He imagined mathematical formulae that might describe the angle of her cheekbones.

Chapter 21 NOCTURNE IN BLUE.

In the summertime, some of the objects that Gideon had studied were s.h.i.+pped north to the city to be sold at auction in the Tech Exchange, and the rest were cleared into a smaller room, for Nonesuch House was to host a party. As Lord of London, G.o.dshawk was expected to be hospitable. His Suomi mercenaries went to and fro along the causeway, checking for b.o.o.by traps and clearing stands of trees where Skinner terrorists might lurk. Canopies and marquees flowered on G.o.dshawk's lawns, and famous scent artists like Eldritch Hooter and Odourita arrived to load the scent lanterns with their specially composed perfumes.

Gideon's work languished as the day of the party drew near. G.o.dshawk seemed to have forgotten all about the remainder of his collection, and even Wavey stopped visiting, spending her afternoons instead trying on dresses with the help of a new slave girl her father had bought for her in the city. Gideon sat in his room, thinking about her, listlessly trying to concentrate on his notes and drawings, distracted by the tuning-up of power shawms and pneumatic sackbuts in the bandstand below his window.

He wasn't invited to the party, of course. But nor was he forbidden from attending, and when the whole of Nonesuch House was filled with revellers and rowdy as a St Kylie boozer, there was not much else that he could do. He wandered through the crowded rooms, listening to the music and sniffing the rich odors that unfurled from the scent lanterns. Wavey had told him that her people could see scents, and had spoken pa.s.sionately about the great perfume symphonies of Hooter, Klopstock, and DeFries, which to her were not just smells but s.h.i.+mmering, luminous fields of subtle color. Gideon tried to imagine what that would be like, but he couldn't; the scents just made him sneeze. He swiped a gla.s.s from a pa.s.sing waiter's tray and wandered on, ignored by the Scriven, who shouted small talk at one another over his head.

"Hooter's in good form! What does he call this scent?"

"I think it's Nocturne in Blue ."

"Did you hear about Stefan Destrier? The Skinners got him, laid in wait for him by his own gate."

"Disgraceful! G.o.dshawk must do something to discipline these monkeys...."

The Scriven men wore stack-heeled boots and pearl-studded evening coats; the ladies in their vast skirts looked like mythical creatures, half woman, half sofa. Wavey G.o.dshawk glided by, heading to the dance floor, arm in arm with some old Scriven lord. Her face was lifted toward her partner's, and her eyes were smiling, but she kept her mouth closed, and Gideon knew that it was because she felt self-conscious about the brace on her teeth. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

"There goes Odo Bolventor with the G.o.dshawk girl," said a Scriven, leaning over Gideon's shoulder to point out the couple to his friend.

"I hear G.o.dshawk's been trying to arrange a marriage. He needs an heir."

"And Bolventor needs her dowry. He calls himself Margrave of Thurrock, but he's as poor as a gnat!"

They moved on, still gossiping, never realizing that they had just squashed Gideon's dreams. He pushed his way out of the room. He did not want to watch Wavey dancing with her Margrave. He went out into the gardens, glad to be away from the heat and noise of the party and the cloying odors of the scent lanterns. He walked past the ghostly marquees, past the gangs of servants who were busy lighting float lamps and setting them adrift upon the evening air. The sounds of music and chitchat faded as he went downhill toward the still lagoons.

"Having fun, Dr. Crumb?"

There were statues among the shrubbery. As Gideon turned to see who'd spoken, one of them seemed to come to life. Auric G.o.dshawk strolled toward him, the night wind flipping the skirts of his printed silk evening gown. There was a gla.s.s of brandy in his hand. It slopped and glittered as he gestured uphill toward the house. "They make a racket, don't they? Parties are meant for the young, not old men like me."

"Yes, sir."

He came closer, peering at Gideon's face in the light of the moon, which hung low and yellowish above the hill.

"You look crushed, Crumb. Like a well-trodden biscuit. What's wrong?"

"Nothing, sir," said Gideon. He wondered if the old Scriven understood what he felt for Wavey. He said, "Sir, do you think that some of my fellow Engineers are right when they say that emotion should be avoided? That we must suppress all feelings if we are to be truly rational?"

G.o.dshawk looked surprised, the way that people generally do when you ask them philosophical questions in shrubberies in the middle of the night. He snorted, and took another sip of his brandy. "I don't know about that, Crumb. We Scriven have always been very keen on emotions. Sensations, feelings, that sort of thing. We live only once, and we might as well enjoy all the pleasures that the old world has to offer us on our journey through it."

"But emotions are so painful," said Gideon. He felt as if he were confessing, I am in love with your daughter. He felt sure the old Scriven must understand him.

G.o.dshawk nodded, looking out over the lagoons. Lanterns drifted above the water, and beyond the marshes the lights of London twinkled in the mist.

"Yes, pain's a part of it," he said. "When we see something beautiful we want to possess it. But we know we can't, don't we? And that hurts. Beauty fades, things change, time moves us on." He drained his gla.s.s and raised it to Gideon before throwing it aside. Then, reaching inside his robes, he took out a small silver case. "Look at this," he said. He flipped it open. Inside, on the crumpled silk lining, lay a s.h.i.+ning thing of polished steel, or maybe some other alloy that no one any longer knew a name for. Something from the Ancient world. G.o.dshawk took it out, holding it carefully between the tips of his forefinger and thumb. Just a wee thing it was, the shape of a walnut, the size of an almond. "Look at this, Crumb. In theory, a man's whole life could be recorded in a seed like this, all his hopes and loves and fears, and all his knowledge."

Gideon looked at the object, and wondered what G.o.dshawk expected him to say. "I see," he murmured at last, trying to sound impressed, but fearing he sounded merely foolish.

G.o.dshawk chuckled, for no reason that Gideon could understand. He snapped the case shut and put it back in whatever inner pocket it had come from. The moon had risen higher, and shone ghostly in the garden's mysterious pools. "It's a pretty world," he said. "What a pity we Scriven won't inherit it. And now I must return to my guests. They'll probably expect a speech or some such nonsense. Don't stay out here in the cold too long, Dr. Crumb! Back to bed with you, and get some sleep."

But Gideon knew that sleep would be impossible. The party was set to go on all night. He walked along the water's edge, all the way around the hill. Long after midnight he started to climb back up the terraces. Gla.s.s broke somewhere nearby; a small p.r.i.c.kling sound. He looked toward the summer house and saw a movement there. Went closer, and heard the sound of soft sobs. Someone weeping.

"Wavey?" He recognized her dress, in the summer house dark. She stood with her back to him, a hand raised to her face. The shards of a gla.s.s glittered on the floor nearby. She held a little jar in her hand. As he watched she upended it, tipping out some of its contents onto a lint pad. Then she went on rubbing her face.

"Miss G.o.dshawk?" he said.

She turned with a little gasp. "What are you doing here?" she asked. Her words wobbled in the middle and blurred at the edges. She was a little drunk, and he thought she had been crying. And then, as he went toward her, he saw that the markings on her face had gone. He thought at first that it must be a trick of that dim light, but it was not. Those Scriven stains which had showed so strikingly on her forehead and high cheekbones and along the curve of her jaw had been washed away.

"You are not really a Scriven!" he said.

"Of course I'm a Scriven, you fool," replied Wavey G.o.dshawk.

The soft, consoling scent of the cream she'd used to clean her face came wafting toward him. She threw the wet lint pad on the floor. "I am as much a Scriven as he is. Look!" And she came closer to Gideon and twisted her head and lifted her hair to show him a sepia patch on the side of her neck. "Look ... She tore open her lace collar and undid the top two b.u.t.tons of her bodice and pulled it open to show him another speckle, black in the moonlight, which lay in the hollow above her collarbone like a pool of ink. "Not good enough for Odo Bolventor!" she said nastily. "Odo Bolventor, Margrave of Thurrock. Margrave of Puke! I'm better without him. To think I would have married him!"

Gideon took a nervous step away from her, alarmed by the unsettling impulses that were telling him to go closer. Wavey had always seemed to him so haughty and so self-a.s.sured. He would never have imagined that she would behave in such an emotional, undignified way, and in front of a mere human like him. He said awkwardly, "I don't understand...."

"Of course, you don't. How could you understand? You're just a dull old h.o.m.o sapiens, and I am Scriven!" She lifted her head, tilting her pale chin proudly at him. Her dress rustled; beneath the silk, stays, and corsets, the stiff wicker frame that gave her skirt its shape creaked softly in time to her hurried breathing. Then, turning away, she said weepily, "I was born like this. Some Scriven are nowadays. Our race is failing. I have a few markings, but not many, and none on my face. When I was little the other girls used to say that the Scrivener ran out of ink when he came to write on me.

"So I used makeup. Wendigo's Patent Body Ink. I spray it on through a stencil mask, so my marks look always the same. But Scriven society is such a small world, and there is so much gossip, that of course the Margrave came to hear of it. Tonight, while we were dancing, he asked me if it was true, and when I said it was he said he would not be made a fool of, and would not marry a freak, and risk having his sons born blank like me. He said I was as ugly as boiled fish."

Gideon wanted to say, "You aren't ugly." He wanted to tell her how beautiful she was. But instead he said, "Your father says that the time of the Scriven is over. Perhaps it will be an advantage to have no speckles, which would show what you are to the commons...."

"The commons," said Wavey dismissively, and then looked up at him as if she had remembered something. "It was you who saved me from them. That day in the city ... She laughed, a soft, wondering laugh. "Why did you do that?"

"I don't know," said Gideon truthfully.

A floating lantern drifted past, and its light came through the gla.s.s roof and brushed Wavey's face. She smiled, sudden and bewitching. "I don't believe I ever thanked you," she said. "We can be so thoughtless, can't we, we h.o.m.o superiors?" She took his hands and drew him close to her. She smelled of wine and cosmetics. Her breath felt hot against his face. "Why are you shaking like that?" she asked. "What is your name, anyway? I can't just call you Dr. Crumb."

"I'm G-gideon," he managed to say.

"Then thank you, G-gideon," she said, and at last she kissed him, and her lips were parted, and the wires of the brace on her teeth gently grazed his mouth.

Chapter 22 the fifth word.

It had not lasted, of course. A love affair between a Londoner and a Scriven? It had not lasted out the month. But for a while the whole balance of Gideon's life had s.h.i.+fted. Instead of reason he was guided by the unfathomable feelings that Wavey aroused in him. He neglected his work and sat waiting for her brief, stolen visits. He once or twice considered writing poems. He didn't know if she loved him as much as he loved her or if he was just a distraction for her. At night sometimes, while the rest of the house slept, he would go quietly out into the gardens, and she would be waiting for him in their summer house. "G.o.dshawk must never know of this," she said, holding him in her strong, speckled arms.

But G.o.dshawk knew almost everything that went on in his house. He had been suspicious of his daughter's reasons for choosing Gideon ever since the young Engineer arrived. That new slave girl he had bought her was his spy. One afternoon, in the middle of a hissing storm of cold gray rain, Gideon was called before him.

The great man was waiting for him in the vault beneath the house, a place that Gideon had never visited before. It seemed devoted to the study of Stalkers. Dozens stood or lay about like charmless statues with their heads prized open. In the vats that lined the walls floated dead people -- or at least, Gideon hoped they were dead. Severed heads in jars lined a shelf behind G.o.dshawk's desk, and the glare that the inventor shot at him as he came in made Gideon fear for a moment that his own would shortly join them.

"Do you take me for a fool, Crumb?" the inventor asked.

"No, sir ...

Gideon looked for help. In a corner of the room stood Wavey G.o.dshawk. Her face was stenciled with its familiar markings, that flock of wild geese on her brow and cheeks. He remembered how closely and solemnly she had watched him as they lay together in the summer house amid the s.h.i.+pwreck of her dress. Now she would not even look at him, just stared haughtily at the ceiling.