Scrivener's Moon Read Online Free PDF

amid a ring of smaller traction-houses, and behind them the Kometsvansen, a tail of barges and wagons and mammoths and reindeer herds which stretched for eighty miles across the tundra.
    If there had still been people in the Ancients’ legendary skycastles, thought Cluny Morvish, they would have been able to look down from space and wonder at the Kometsvansen as it went creeping across the snows of Heklasrand like a line of ants; the biggest parade the world had ever seen. How astonished they would be at the power and glory of Arkhangelsk! It made her feel proud as she stood upon the balcony of her family’s rolling fort and watched the other vehicles spread out astern in the light of the First Frost Moon; all those campavans and wanigans, with a few spiky landships snarling up and down the fringes of the convoy, keeping watch for raiders.
    Where was it going? The little people back there in the Great Carn’s wake did not care; they followed his heart-fort without question, as their fathers and their fathers’ fathers had. But Cluny’s family had a fort of their own to steer, and Cluny’s father was a Carn, and privy to the decisions that the Great Carn made in his high council chamber. Cluny was only a maiden, seventeen winters old, but since her older brother Doran died her father had taken her more and more into his confidence, so she knew how hard such decisions had become.
    To Cluny, her empire’s travels felt like the aimless pacing of a trapped animal in a cage. In the north the new volcanoes were spewing ash across the empire’s former pastures. In the east the Iron-horde of the Novaya-Khazak barred the way. In the west there was nothing but cold sea and cold, hard, hopeless, nightwight-haunted hills. And to the south there was the Movement; a small empire, but fierce in its defence of the Fuel Country, and greedy for material since it had conquered London. Just that day a merchant had brought word of the city that Quercus was remaking there. There had been a tattered pamphlet with a woodcut of the great tiers rising. Crude and unbelievable, yet it had unsettled Cluny, like a fingernail drawn across the blackboard of her mind; like a memory of some childhood nightmare. That was why she was up on the sterncastle that night instead of in her nice warm bed below. That was why she was watching the lights of the Kometsvansen through the veils of her freezing breath.
    “We must move south soon, or perish,” she had heard her father say, when the Carns of the other traction-houses came aboard to talk over the merchant’s news. “Perhaps this mad moving city notion will draw the Movement’s strength away to London.”
    “It will need oil,” said gloomy Carn Masgard. “A whole moving city? It will drink oil like I drink vodka, Carn Morvish. It will eat coal like a child eats cloudberries. The Movement will fight harder than ever to keep hold of the Fuel Country now.”
    “We will defeat them,” said Carn Persinger. “These new electric guns our technomancers have contrived, these Tesla weapons. . .”
    “They are not enough,” said Cluny’s father. “We lost twelve forts this past year alone. Twelve forts, a hundred landships, thousands of good men. . .” He did not need to remind them that he had lost a son as well.
    Above Cluny’s head the northern sky fluttered its magic lights. In the far south-west the clouds flashed with gun-light as another assault got under way against the Movement mechanized divisions dug in around Hill 60. All this fighting , she thought, remembering how she had longed to go south with Doran the previous summer, and how it had not been allowed because she was a girl, and how Doran had not returned. He had fought bravely, the survivors said, but then the Movement had unleashed its Stalkers, and who could fight against the armoured dead? How stupid it all is, she thought. If only there could be peace.
    But there was never peace; not among the nomad empires. The best you