Read Online Fever Crumb by Philip Reeve - Free Book Online

little Fern had looked upon her father's lap, she found herself wishing very much that she had grown up with a father like him, and a mother, too.
    "Don't be ridiculous," she told herself, sitting up in bed. She must have been lying there awake for hours. Wanting to clear her head, she got up and lit her candle and padded downstairs to find a glass of water. A faint, haunting musk hung in the air, making her wonder if Kit had left the scent lantern alight when he went up to bed, but when she looked into the drawing room the lantern was open and unlit. The portrait of Katie Solent smiled down at her from the wall, and she held up the candle for a while and stood there looking at the picture, and at her own reflection in the glass, trying to make out a resemblance. But there was none, and she could not really believe that she was Mistress Solent's daughter. In her memory, just out of reach, was the face of a quite different woman that matched her own much better. Who did she remind herself of?
    Unsettled, she went to the kitchen for her drink and then hurried quietly back upstairs. On the first landing she noticed a door standing open. It had been shut earlier but Kit Solent must have been in there before he turned in. Fever's curiosity overcame her. She pushed the door wider, and stepped through into a library.
    It was nothing like as large as the Order's library at Godshawk's Head, and many of the volumes looked worthless -- novels and poems and fantasy quartets, no good for anything but pulping -- yet it was impressive, all the same. Bookcases alternated with windows all the way round the room, and through the windows the moon shone, making silver-gray shapes of light on the floorboards. On a table in the center, a book lay open beside a lit scent lantern, the source of that ghostly smell which still flavored the air.
    Fever breathed deeply, intrigued by the musty odor. It was the same scent that Ruan had put on downstairs, or one very like it. And it so nearly reminded Fever of something. She closed her eyes, and the scent seeded her mind with pleasant memories. Dew-wet evening lawns. Lilies in bloom on geometric pools. Fire balloons lofting into a lilac sky...
    She shook her head, almost angry at herself. Those were not memories! The image was a fantasy, or a half-remembered dream, neither of which had any place in a well-ordered mind.
    Feeling giddy, she leaned on the table, and looked down at the open book. It was a large, old-fashioned volume, with circular pages bound between two discs of leather in the Scriven style. On the open page was a drawing, or perhaps a diagram. Fever couldn't make it out at first. She set down her candle and placed her hands on the table on either side of the book and looked down at the page, and suddenly she was falling into the picture.
    What was it? What did it show? She could not be sure. Looping lines of smudged pencil swept across the page, bisecting three big interlocking rings, and inside those rings were smaller rings, and other forms: small crosses, squares, and shapes that reminded her of cogs and pistons. She wished that Dr. Crumb were there with her. Together, she was sure, they would have been able to make sense of it. But even without him she started to understand that some of those pencil marks meant patterns of force, and she could see how some of those shapes might move inside each other, and around each other. And that egg-shaped thing marked (d) might act as a kind of regulator on the movement of the other pieces....
    It was an engine, she realized, and with that realization came a blazing star of pain, somewhere at the back of her head.
    She cried out, and the diagram seemed to jump up at her out of the creamy paper and close around her like a net. In the middle of it a red flower appeared, and she straightened up, looking in horror at the splash of blood that had fallen on the drawing.
    Cupping one hand under her streaming nose she pulled out her handkerchief and set one