Free Scrivener's Moon by Philip Reeve

brought her aboard the Sandwich and took off the gag those Skinners had put on her? Why, she just looked around, cool as a cucumber, calm as a courgette, and she says, ‘I expect you could use a technomancer.’ Turned out she wasn’t just the Last Living Dapplejack, but a machine-wrangler too, and soon she was rigging up murdering machines to thrill our punters, as fierce as any that ever spilled a fighter’s blood at Pickled Eel Circus. Halved the coal our engines ate, to boot. Even made herself a boiler-plate bikini and took turns in the fighting pit herself sometimes, though we had to paint some extra speckles on her, since the Scrivener had been so parsimonious with her pigmentation.”
    He sighed, and a smoke ring wobbled up out of his pipe and hung in the air above his head like a fading halo. “She was our wonder girl,” he said. “Near broke my black old heart when we stopped among the Movement’s forts one time and she chose to up and leave us and become technomancer to Quercus. Not that I blame her for it. She’s a lady, and made for better things than this old carnival.”
    He fell silent, watching the flames in the stove. Was that a tear glinting in the crease beneath his eye?
    “You said you had news for me, Jasper,” Wavey reminded him, after a little while.
    Borglum looked up. “That’s right. I ’spect it’s nothing, but you told me once how old Godshawk went expeditioning up into the edges of the ice, and how he found an old tower there, a pirrie-mid sorta thing, up in Caledon.”
    Wavey nodded. “A place the snowmads call Skrevanastuut. That’s right. Godshawk thought it might be important, but he had a terrible time getting there. When he finally reached the pyramid, he found that there was no way in. He came home knowing nothing more about its origins than when he left London. It was long ago. I was just a little girl.”
    “Well, I remember you telling me that story,” said Borglum. “And I heard something else just recently that brought it to mind. I was talking to a scavenger named Duergar, who’d been up in them hills last summer, and lingered too long, and got caught by the first snow. Struggling south again he’d lost his way, and fetched up at this pirrie-mid of yours, which most folks in the north know to avoid, because it’s the haunt of ghosts and nightwights and the walking dead. He told me that there’s a way in now. Those earth-storms we’ve had up north these past few years have opened a crack or a fissure or something, and he reckoned that somebody could get inside, if they wanted to. Which he didn’t, on account of how haunted and unlucky the place is. He was dying when I talked with him, and he blamed his sickness on having spent just one night in the shadow of that pirrie-mid. Though given how much he drank, I ’spect it was booze that killed him, not a curse.”
    Wavey said nothing. Dr Crumb looked at her inquiringly and said, “I have heard of these pyramids. There are several of them, far to the north, on the High Ice. It is where Stalker brains are supposed to have come from. I did not know that there were any so far south as Caledon. . .”
    “There aren’t,” said Wavey. “All the pyramids that we know of on the ice were looted long ago. This one at Skrevanastuut is different. It is smaller, and Godshawk believed that it might be even older.”
    “Perhaps the first Stalker-builders made it and then moved north to construct the others,” reasoned Dr Crumb. “The world may have been warmer then.”
    Wavey was looking at the fire. She said, “Godshawk believed that the Skrevanastuut structure might hold . . . oh, all sorts of secrets.”
    “If there is really a way in, we shall soon hear all about them,” said Dr Crumb. “Some scavenger or archaeologist will have penetrated its mysteries by now.”
    “Not likely,” said Borglum. “The passes have all been closed by winter since old Duergar came by. Even if they weren’t, the place is