Scrivener's Moon by Philip Reeve Page B

little alleys that were still standing in that quarter of the city until she was satisfied that they were not being followed, and then out across the endless, windswept, empty lots which had once been Whitechapel and Shadwell, until they came to a hole. There were steps leading down into it and a brick-lined portal at the bottom. Weeds grew round it. It gave Charley the creeps. Reminded him of that nasty tunnel he’d slunk along once in search of Fever Crumb, the day the Movement came. Still, he wasn’t going to let Gwen Natsworthy see that he was scared, so he went down the steps and she followed, and in a little maze of forgotten cellars down there her friends were waiting for him.
    There were five of them. One was the priestess-like woman he had met before, but he did not know the others. They were men, and they all wore workers’ slops, those stiff garments of blue and blue-grey hemp that had become the unofficial uniform of London these past few years. One man was smoking a pipe and the fug from it hung between their faces and Charley’s so that it was hard to see them clearly, and he wondered if that was deliberate.
    Gwen Natsworthy followed him in and kicked a door shut behind her. The lantern flames wavered, throwing odd shadows up the walls, and for a moment he felt uneasy again ’cos they could kill him down here and who’d ever know. Who’d come looking for Charley Shallow? No one, that was who.
    “This is the boy,” said the priestess (though Charley wasn’t sure she was a priestess now; the mark had gone off her forehead and she was in normal clothes like all the rest).
    “The Skinner’s boy, as was,” said one of the men.
    “Still am, master,” said Charley. He had got the impression at his first meeting that these Undergrounders had it in for Wavey Godshawk, and he thought he could use his background as a Skinner to impress them. “I work for the northerners, but I’m a Londoner through and through: a proper Mockney, born within earshot of Bowie Bells. I just been biding my time, waiting for a chance to bring some harm to that speckled witch.”
    “Good lad,” a man said.
    “No.” It was the pipe-smoker who had spoken. He had a posher way of talking than the rest. He took the pipe out of his mouth and pointed at Charley with its stem. “That sort of talk is no good. It’s not Wavey Godshawk that we hate. Her speckled skin does not concern us. Quercus and his northerners don’t offend us because of their northern-ness. You mustn’t get the idea that we are crackpot London-for-the-Londoners fanatics, peddling hate for hate’s sake. The only thing that we are against, the thing that we are sworn to destroy, is the new city.”
    The others muttered their agreement. Even the man who’d called Charley a good lad said, “Sorry, Doc, yeah.”
    “Doc’s tellin’ it right,” said Gwen Natsworthy. “My old street got cleared away to make that new city. It’s nothing but waste and lunacy and wickedness.”
    “My street too,” said one of the men. “All our homes are gone. Quercus promises new homes for all aboard that monstrosity of his, but who’d want to live in them? Eh? Who?”
    “Nobody,” said Charley obediently, although secretly he was thinking that quite a lot of people would, given how airy and neat the houses on the new city were compared with the slums that Quercus had cleared. But he wasn’t going to risk offending these people. This was the most interesting thing that had happened to him for months. He was looking forward to seeing where it would lead.
    “We want this new city stopped, see?” said a third man; an old plastic-smith judging by the way he wheezed, his lungs ruined by the fierce fumes from the blending vats. He reminded Charley a bit of Bagman Creech; same phlegmy whine; same mad light in his eyes. “We want it stopped, and London put back the way we liked it; the way it always was.”
    “The way it was but better ,” insisted Gwen Natsworthy. “With