Scrivener's Moon by Philip Reeve Page A

them.
    Charley Shallow watched her. Milly was agreeably thrilled and clung to him in just the way that he had hoped, but he ignored her, for he had noticed something far more interesting. At the last lull in the action, when the dwarf Borglum came riding round the arena on his tame Stalker, introducing the next pair of fighters, he had spotted Wavey in the crowd, and their eyes had met. She had given the faintest little smile, and just for an instant the showman had lost the thread of what he was saying. It had been only a tiny hesitation, and it was only because he was watching Wavey instead of the show that Charley had noticed it at all. Now he was trying to think what it might mean. What possible connection could there be between the Chief Engineer and this disreputable out-country dwarf?
    After a long time, when most of the fighters had fallen, a young albino snowmad was left battling against the Stalker. Everyone was rooting for him. Fever almost joined the chant herself, but remembered just in time that she was an Engineer and immune to the crowd’s gusts of emotion. Still, she could not help but admire the young man. There was real skill in the way he parried the Stalker’s blows with that cleaver-like snowmad sword. But surely, she thought, as she watched him twirl through the lamplight, it was irrational for him to wear his white hair so long?
    She was right. The Stalker grabbed him by his flying ponytail and yanked back his head, bearing his throat to one of its rusty blades. The watching Londoners all gasped together. Fever felt herself gasp too, afraid for the boy even though the fight was fake. For an instant she thought that he really was about to die; that maybe Borglum’s carnival must end with real blood before the audience could go home satisfied. She felt disgusted, and underneath the disgust was an undertow of something worse: a dark excitement.
    Then Blind Lady Midnight – who had been swiped aside by the Stalker earlier in the fight and flung across the ring with such violence that half the crowd thought she was dead and the rest had forgotten her – recovered suddenly and came to the boy’s rescue. She was immensely tall and strong but earlier, when Borglum introduced her, she had torn off her blindfold to show everyone her spooky white eyes, without iris or pupil. The audience gasped again as she crossed the arena in a series of handsprings and vaulted up to sit astride the Stalker’s huge head.
    “Lady Midnight is not really blind,” said Wavey. “Those misshape eyes of hers see heat instead of light.”
    “She can perceive the infrared end of the spectrum?” asked Dr Crumb, intrigued despite himself.
    “Hush!” laughed his wife. “It is much more dramatic if people think she has no sight at all.”
    The Stalker had let go of the snowmad and was flailing its claws at Lady Midnight, but its shoulders were so massive that it couldn’t reach her. While it was trying, she drew a bodkin and drove it through the green eye-slit, which spewed a satisfying cloud of sparks and vapour and went dark. The snowmad boy, meanwhile, picked up his sword, found a chink in the Stalker’s armour and drove it in, letting out more sparks, more smoke, and a spew of ichor. The Stalker groaned like rusty brakes and toppled backwards, Lady Midnight jumping clear as it crashed to the canvas. She reached out to the snowmad boy, who took her hand, and together they made their bow while the boneyard music started up again. The show was over.
    “What a horrible spectacle!” complained Dr Crumb.
    “But so exciting!” said Wavey. She shifted uncomfortably, and Fever knew that she was in pain. Her pelvis had been broken by the rogue Stalker Shrike years before, and although the injury had healed well, a night of dancing and an hour on Borglum’s hard bleachers was enough to set it hurting again. Of course Wavey would never mention it; she hated anyone to think that she was weak. She kept her smile and said, “It