Free Scrivener's Moon by Philip Reeve Page A

cursed.”
    “My dear sir, there is no such thing as a curse.”
    “Maybe not. But the snowmads believe there is, and they’re the only people likely to go a-roaming in those lonely hills. They’ll steer clear of that old pirrie-mid, be it open or shut.”
    Wavey laughed her silvery laugh. “Dear Jasper! And you came all this way just to tell me of it.”
    “Not just that, Duchess.” Borglum blushed a deep red. “We’re here on business, like I said.”
    The barge shook with footsteps. The cabin door opened to let in Quatch and the snowmad boy. Borglum jumped up, saying, “You remember Quatch, Duchess, and here is one of our new recruits, Harrison Stickle. We call him Stick.”
    It seemed that Wavey did remember Quatch, for she was already hugging him, snuggling her head against his hairy shoulder, while Dr Crumb looked on and worried about fleas. Fever made a neat, Engineerish bow to Harrison Stickle, who looked away from her and said to Borglum, “We chased that snooper far into the tents, chief, but there we lost him. . .”
    *
    In the chamber behind the altar Charley had struggled with his captors, uncertain how many they were or what they meant to do with him. In the confusion he imagined that they must be some of Borglum’s people, and bit desperately at the hand which was gagging him.
    “Ow! Keep still, kid!” said a gruff voice. “Do you want those northish ’shapes to find us all?”
    Charley went still. He heard other people round him keeping still too: their breathing; the sounds their clothes made as they shifted. Outside, the voices of his hunters moved away.
    “They’ve gone,” a woman’s voice said.
    Someone opened the shade of a dark-lantern and yellow light washed over wall paintings of scenes from the Life of St Kylie. The place was a robing room where the priestesses of the cult changed into their mitres and ceremonial hot-pants on festival days. The woman who had spoken looked like a priestess herself; dark robes, and the saffron mark of the saint on her high white forehead. Two men stood with her; ordinary men, with ordinary faces attached to ordinary bodies, clad in the overalls of workers on the new city. One held a pair of paint pots, so it seemed safe to assume that these were the people who had just finished painting the roundel of the London Underground on the temple wall when Charley blundered in.
    He supposed that he should feel afraid of them. Everyone knew that the London Underground were terrorists. But they seemed so much less frightening than the fighters from the Carnival of Knives that it was hard to feel anything but relieved.
    “Why were they after you?” the woman asked.
    “Saw me nosing round their circus,” said Charley.
    “I told you we should let them take him,” said one of the men, the older one, whose cropped white hair glittered like hoar frost in the lantern light. “They’d probably just have given him a good hiding and let him go. Now he’s seen us.”
    “We’ll have to kill him,” said the other man, but he didn’t sound very convinced, and neither of his friends took any notice.
    The priestess moved closer to Charley, studying the knife they’d taken from him. She was a tall, plain-featured woman with a stale, sweetish smell of incense coming off her clothes each time she moved. She read the legend on the knife’s handle and then looked hard into Charley’s face. “He’s the Skinner’s boy!” she said. She shut the knife and turned to her friends. “Don’t you remember the upsets before the Movement came? He’s Bagman Creech’s boy, I’d swear to it!”
    Charley felt grateful to her for remembering. There’d be no question of harming him now that they knew who he was. He smiled his friendliest smile.
    The older man turned away in disgust. “Some Skinner’s boy! He works for that Dapplejack slut who Quercus made Chief Engineer.”
    “That’s not true!” said Charley. “I mean, it is, but I never asked to work for her.