A Web of Air (18 page)

“But the children, and my friends…”

“We’ll get word to them when they return, I promise. But you can’t stay in Mayda. Come with me. You can help me. Isn’t that what you wanted? Fever, I’ll teach you to fly…”

oat,
she thought dreamily, as the bed she lay on lifted her up and down, up and gently down.
I’m on a boat.

She opened her eyes. She was in a cabin even smaller than her quarters on the
Lyceum,
and the reflections of sunlight came through a small porthole and patterned the low roof with ripply ribbons of light. The bed went up and down, up and gently down.

After Arlo freed her from the rails he had not led her down the garden to Casas Elevado as she’d expected, but up, towards the screes and crags at the top of the crater wall. It seemed the Thursday house had a back exit. A narrow fissure breached the crags, screened by trees, all but invisible. The path which wound through it opened on to empty cliff side on the crater’s steep south-western face. There the Aranha had been waiting for them, motionless and moon-silvery, and Fever tried to tell herself it was a dream while Arlo helped her down the cliff paths and the Aranha walked behind, hopping along on its big, clawed feet, its shell all spiny like a deep-sea urchin, the joints of its legs whizzing and creaking and squeaking, the gravel of the path scrunching as it set its feet down, the sea booming in the rocky coves below.
Not a demon,
she thought.
A machine
…

But although she tried to order her thoughts and observe it rationally, she couldn’t. She was too shocked and exhausted by her misfortunes. She slept or fainted several times between the cliff’s top and the beach and to her shame Arlo had to pick her up and carry her. He didn’t seem to mind. “Light as a bird, you are,” he said.

And then they were on the shore, in a tight little steep-walled secret cove where a boat rode at anchor. It was about thirty feet long, without the beak or stern-castle that boats from Mayda usually wore. Fever saw polished wood shining faintly as he carried her aboard. She heard the tick and creak of the Aranha as it withdrew itself into the bushes and the shadows on the shore.

Arlo had brought her down the cockpit steps and left her in this cabin, where she had eased herself out of her wet clothes and into this bunk with its clean, crisp covers and woolly, comforting blankets. She had snuggled down and gone to sleep as easily as Fern…

She sat herself up and looked out of the porthole, but there was nothing to see but sea. The water foamed white along the boat’s side, and she realized that it was not at anchor any more.

So she stirred herself, despite wanting to go back to sleep. She swung her legs over the bed’s edge and pushed herself upright. The swaying of the deck took a little getting used to, but it was not so different from riding the
Lyceum
over rough ground. She dressed and went to the door and opened it and climbed up the narrow ladder she found outside it, emerging into sunlight and the crying of angels.

The big birds hung all about her, riding the sea wind above the boat and on either side of it. Shadows of them slid over the taut sail, a parallelogram of white canvas which reared high above Fever’s head. Away from land and people the angels seemed less absurd; their wide wings were made for these empty spaces, and instead of begging for scraps they were finding their own food, stooping every so often to pluck a shining fish from the wave-tops. Fever watched them for a while, wondering if one of them was Weasel and how she could thank him for saving her.

“Fever!”

Arlo Thursday was sitting at the tiller at the stern of the boat. There was a blanket wrapped around him, and she had the impression that he had not slept. Behind him, far astern, Fever saw the unmistakable outline of Mayda silhouetted against the morning sun. She turned, and there behind a cloud of birds were the Ragged Isles, jutting from their skirts of surf a few miles ahead.

“This is one of my grandfather’s ships,” said Arlo, pushing the tiller over, the boat heeling. “In fact she’s about seven of them; a bit from one hulk and a bit from another; I rescued them from the wrecker’s yards and cobbled them back together. She’s called the
Jenny Haniver.
In the Museum at Mayda there are some things which the old sea priests claimed were mermaids. They’re bogus, of course, stitched together from halves of monkeys and fish. They’re called Jenny Hanivers, and since my
Jenny Haniver
was stitched together from pieces too, it seemed a likely name.”

Fever looked about. Brass rails, oak planking, that towering sail. “Where is the Aranha?” she said.

“It will make its own way to the place we’re going.”

“It can swim?”

“I suppose.”

In Fever’s memory the Aranha paced down the cliff path, spines agleam, its back-to-front knees glinting as it minced along. “It is a machine,” she said.

“A very old machine. A gift to my grandfather from a grateful client.”

Fever could guess who the grateful client had been. She had seen things a bit like the Aranha before, in pictures and in the memories which she had inherited from Auric Godshawk. When the Scriven ruled London machines like that had been unleashed in Pickled Eel Circus to slaughter their enemies. If her grandfather had kept a few for the Scrivens’ army the London mobs would never have been able to overthrow him, but no, he had chosen to squander them all in bloody games with human gladiators, or give them to his friends…

“It has a Stalker’s brain inside,” said Arlo.

“It must have more than that,” said Fever, thinking back to the Resurrectory aboard Quercus’s traction fortress, where she had watched Fern and Ruan’s father reborn. “It must have been a person once.”

“Not quite.”

Fever glanced at him. “An angel?”

Arlo nodded. “It is the world’s one and only Stalker-angel. Armed with a swift-firing gun. It saved my grandfather and my father many times when their enemies hired the Shadow Men or the Lords of Pain to murder them.”

And in return, thought Fever, his grandfather had built Godshawk a ship: the
Black Poppy,
a fast, strong ship that took him north to frozen islands on the fringes of the great whiteness, searching for more knowledge of the Stalkers. How he would have loved this voyage, she thought; the sunlight and the motion of the cutter and the blue, salt smell of the sea. It was almost as if he were still there, just beneath the surface of her conscious mind.

The
Jenny Haniver
ran on into the west with her escort of angels all about her and the sunlit water foaming down her flanks, and soon she began to pass among the Ragged Isles.

Twenty miles to the west of Mayda there had once been a second crater, even bigger, and perhaps created by the same Ancient weapon. But perhaps because it lay in deeper water, or was made from different rocks, the wall of this western crater had crumbled to form a loose ring of spiky islands and treacherous shoals. Seeing them from Mayda, Fever had taken them to be barren, and certainly they looked sheer-sided and inaccessible. But as the
Jenny Haniver
sailed between them Fever saw that there were mats of grass on the tops of some, pine trees and dwarf oak jutting at angles from the cliffs, and on one of the largest, a scatter of ruins.

Arlo moved the tiller and the cutter swung her nose towards it, passing through narrow straits between high jagged rocks. Other rocks, almost submerged, broke the sea’s surface like black teeth. It felt dangerous, but Arlo seemed sure of himself. Fever started to suspect that the angels who flew ahead of the
Jenny Haniver
were not just weaving random paths but were guiding Arlo through those choppy channels; they kept looping back, swooping over the cutter’s helm with raking cries, which the young inventor seemed to understand and respond to, adjusting his course between those slabs and knives of rock.

He saw her watching and laughed. “They are really quite intelligent, if you know how to speak to them.”

Some of the looming rocks had been splashed with angel-guano in patterns that Fever realized were not as random as they seemed. They lined up with one another to form waymarks, blazing a safe trail through the maze for anyone who knew how to read them.

“There is a good, clear, deep water channel further north, beyond those stacks,” said Arlo. “Fishing boats from Mayda pass there sometimes. But Thursday Island itself is bad luck; nobody comes near it now.”

Young trees clustered among the tall, rocky crags on the island’s summit. Lower down Fever could see the ruins which she had glimpsed earlier. Roofless sheds, dead warehouses, the broken stub of a lighthouse on a harbour wall. She remembered the story that Thirza Belkin had told, of the wave that had destroyed the Thursdays and their shipyard. It had come from the west, the shock wave from some almighty earth-storm in lost America, rolling clear across the Atlantic before breaking over Thursday Island. It had smashed down buildings, and sunk the ships whose dead masts could still be seen jutting sadly from the water in the harbour. Close in against the shore there were concrete basins, like the pens of a fish farm, where yachts and schooners must once have been dry-docked. The sea had filled them, and all that was left were crumbled, weedy walls that barely showed above the waves.

Here, among these ruins, young Arlo had lived for months after all his family were drowned, with no one to care for him but the angels. She would have thought it must hold horrible memories for him, but when she glanced at him she saw that he looked happier than he had ever looked in Mayda. This was a homecoming for him. But not for her. This place made her uneasy.

Smiling, Arlo steered the
Jenny Haniver
into one of the abandoned pens, a shady cave-like space between two roofless warehouses so overgrown with weeds and small trees that they looked more like cliffs than buildings. A shiver ran through the cutter as her fenders grazed against the rotting concrete, the sail came rattling down, and for a moment Fever thought that they had run aground, but no, it was all deliberate, and there was Arlo springing forward to make fast to a rusty bollard on the pen wall.

“Welcome, Fever Crumb,” he said, turning, and held out a hand to help Fever ashore. Sand had drifted thickly between the dead buildings. When Fever looked down at it she saw that it was partly composed of thousands upon thousands of tiny white shells. She imagined the great wave scooping them up off the sea floor as it rolled eastwards, depositing them here like payment for the lives and ships it washed away.

Arlo pointed inland, up a cobbled hill. “The shipyard buildings are all in ruins, but the old watchtower was here before them, and it’s still sound, I think…”

A metal ladder, orange and scaly with rust, stitched its way up the cliff face behind the abandoned harbour. Three-quarters of the way up a platform was bolted to the rock, like a landing. From there another ladder rose to the cliff top, where a squat tower perched, dark and unwelcoming, high above the beach. It was very old; a watchtower and artillery emplacement left over from some earlier era.

“Are we going to stay there?” asked Fever.

“Why not? It’s good shelter. We’re castaways; we can’t be choosy.”

Fever’s unease settled on that word “castaways”. Sometimes in the plays at the
Electric Lyceum
people found themselves cast away on desert islands, and if there were two of them, and they were male and female, they might bicker for a scene or two, but they always ended up by falling in love. She hoped that Arlo Thursday would not get that sort of idea.

The sea nearby stirred into ripples, hummocked, and split to disgorge the spiny steel carapace of the Aranha. It stalked out of the water up a flight of weedy steps and stood there dripping, trailing pennants of kelp and bladderwrack, ticking patiently to itself. It looked like a living gun. Had it swum here? Or had it walked, scuttling like a weird crab across all the miles of sandy seabed between this place and Mayda?

She stood there in the sun and stared at it, torn between disgust at its strangeness and envy of her grandfather for knowing how to build such things.

“Don’t be afraid of it,” said Arlo, misunderstanding the look she was giving it. “It’ll keep us safe. If Vishniak or Fat Jago finds us it’ll see them coming, and kill them. Come on now. Let’s unload.”

hey set up camp in the tower. It had one big room with lime-washed walls and arrow-slit windows and a doorway with no door that opened on to a narrow platform outside where the ladder came up through a hatchless trapdoor. There was a fireplace and some broad shelves that might have been bunks set into the walls, and some old tables and chairs covered with dust and angel-droppings. Another ladder went up through another trapdoor on to the broad, flat roof. Guns or scorpions had been mounted up there once, commanding the northern approaches to the island, but they were long gone, leaving only a few rusty metal mountings set in the stonework. There was a low parapet, crumbling in places, sprouting weeds with pink and yellow flowers that nodded and whispered thinly in the breeze.