Scrivener's Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

could hope for was a gap between one war and the next. Cluny turned from the rail and went below. She thought that she was tired enough now to fall asleep. Tomorrow, she would hunt. Rise early and ride hard, following the belling of the hounds till she had left all thought of wars and mobile cities behind.
    She lay in bed and at last the familiar sound of the fort’s engines soothed her to sleep like a lullaby. Then the bad dream that had been sniffing around the edges of her mind ever since she heard that merchant’s tale saw its chance, and found its way in. It came at her like a boar out of a thicket and smashed her awake with a scream that brought guards and servants and the Carn himself all pounding on her chamber door.
    She had not had such a nightmare since she was a little child. It left her whimpering like a baby. It was some minutes before she was able to tell them all what it was that the night had shown her.
    “It was the city . . . Quercus’s new city. It is coming. It will devour us all!”
     
    Four days later, when she had the same dream twenty times and was afraid to even close her eyes, they made her go across to the heart-fortress to tell it to old Nintendo Tharp, the Great Carn’s technomancer. In Tharp’s sanctum, down among the fort’s engines, candles flickered behind the screens of Ancient tellies and puddles of oil burned in Set-a-light dishes and a thousand talismans of wire and circuitry swung from the carved beams. Cluny’s father was there, and the Great Carn himself. They stood and watched while the technomancer circled Cluny, muttering his sacred runes and apps. Tharp had a long face like the face of an aged lizard and a long beard with bones and bits of circuit-board plaited into it. On his head he wore a thick leather cap with a steaming metal stove mounted on top; a samovar-hat in which he was brewing cloudberry tea for the Ancestors. The hot coals inside it shifted and rattled as he shuffled round the chair where Cluny sat with fragments of Ancient power-machines balanced on her head and wrists. He waved his hands in ritual movements, then reached up and turned the handle of the hat’s tap to fill three little glasses, which he set on the deck at Cluny’s feet.
    Cluny had never liked Tharp. As a little girl she had always been secretly afraid that he might pick her or Doran or little Marten when he went looking for a sacrifice to blood the heart-fort’s wheels for Winterdeep. But Tharp was the only one who could say whether Cluny’s dream was just a dream, or something more, so she told it again, sitting statue-still for fear the magic machines would tumble off her head, while he waved rusty devices in front of her face, and her father waited in the background, scared for her and trying not to show it.
    “I saw the new city,” she explained, struggling to keep her voice steady as she recalled the terrible vividness of her dream. “I saw Quercus’s new city finished, rolling across the earth. It was ten times bigger than this fortress. It was like a mountain, but with houses instead of rocks, and factories instead of crags, and wheels instead of foothills. And it had jaws. They opened, and there were furnaces and smithies inside. They closed, and dragged whole forts like this one into London’s belly. And I knew that nothing can stop it, and that if we let it, it will eat up all the world.”
    In the light from behind the dead screens Tharp’s face was as impassive as a leather mask. Steam leaked from his hat. He held an Ancient talking-box against his ear, listening to spirit-voices that only he could hear.
    “This dream was sent by the Ancestors,” he said at last. “It is a warning.”
    Cluny let out a shaky sigh, and one of Tharp’s devices fell off her head and clattered on the deck. She had been hoping and hoping that the dreams were just dreams, and that the technomancer would have some potion that could stop them coming. She did not want to be the medium for