A Web of Air Read Free Page B

thank you at him. She was fairly new to smiling, having been brought up among Engineers who did not approve of it, and she wasn’t really very good at it; she kept her lips tightly closed and her mouth went down at one end and up at the other. Some people might not have recognized it as a smile at all, but Ruan knew what it meant. He stood there feeling proud and happy, holding the torch for her while she went to the open fuse-box, her clever fingers unwrapping the precise length of wire that she needed and twirling it round and round till it broke off the coil.
    She had already stripped out the blown fuse. She wrapped the wire round this terminal, then round that, making a bridge for the ’lectric particles to swarm across, while Ruan watched her. She was sixteen; tall and bony with a strange face that was all angles and large, watchful eyes that didn’t match; one green, one brown. Her hair, which she punished with a hard brush every morning and scraped back into the tightest of buns, was every shade of fair from white to honey, and her old grey linen shirt and canvas trousers were smeared with oil and grease and stained with sweat. In Ruan’s opinion (which no one ever asked for, him being only ten) there was no one in the world as lovely as Fever Crumb.
    She glanced at him with a little frown, as if she wondered why he was staring at her, then reached for the lever on the wall that turned the power on. Anyone else would have crossed their fingers for luck at that moment, or said a prayer to Rada, but not Fever Crumb. She knew that crossing her fingers couldn’t affect the universe, and she was always telling Ruan and his sister that there were no such things as gods or goddesses. But Ruan couldn’t help himself; he crossed as many fingers as he could, behind his back where Fever couldn’t see, and he said a prayer as well, not just to Rada but to the gods of far-off London too; Poskitt and Mad Isa and the Duke…
    The lever came down. The dim red working lights winked on. From outside came a noise like a big wave breaking, and Ruan realized that it was the sound of the audience applauding as the curtains suddenly flamed blood-red in the glare of Fever’s lights.
    Few people in Mayda had ever seen such lights as those before. The knowledge of electricity had survived from Ancient times before the Downsizing, but like all the old knowledge it was spread unevenly. Great cities such as London had buildings made of stone and salvage-plastic and lit at night by ’lectric lanterns, but on the wild Atlantic coasts of World’s End in those days you were more likely to find grass-roofed huts and tallow candles. In some of the settlements which Bargetown had visited that season people thought that its land-barges were magic, and were wary of approaching too close for fear of the demons they thought they heard a-growling and a-griping in their engine-rooms.
    The Maydans were not so primitive as that, but they had a distrust of technology and they mostly did without engines and devices. They had never seen anything like the clean, bright light that burst upon them as the Lyceum opened its curtains.
    The light grew brighter still, illuminating a stage dressed as a castle, with purple-headed mountains (painted by Ruan and Fergus Bucket) stretching off into a smokey distance. A wind was blowing (that was Max Froy standing in the wings, huffing into a conch shell and fanning dead leaves across the set). Clouds sailed across the painted sky, thanks to an invention of Fever’s own; a disc with cloud shapes cut in it spinning in front of one of her floodlights. Dappled by their shifting shadows, Niall Strong-Arm paced the battlements, a figure out of legend sprung to life, looking slightly older than most people had imagined him, but splendid nonetheless, with all those trails and squirlicues of melted-down copper wire gleaming on his armour and the gold visor on his helmet shining in the glow of the extraordinary lamps. Awed, the