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want all my hair cut off, because it gives you pastarites ... "
    After that came five minutes of din and confusion while the children found their school things. "They attend Miss Wernicke's School for a few hours every day," explained Kit Solent through the noise. "It's a jolly place, just a single room above a tech shop on Endemol Street. Miss Wernicke teaches them reading and writing, drawing, singing, and so forth...."
    Fever tried to look interested. She had not heard of Miss Wernicke's establishment. She did not think that Dr. Crumb would approve of it.
    And then, at last, the children were gone; the house was quiet; she was alone with Kit Solent.
    "There!" he said. "Now, Miss Crumb, I shall lead you to my excavation."
    Fever followed him. To her surprise he did not take her back outside into the streets, but deeper into his house.
    When she thought about it, it was not altogether strange. Ludgate Hill was not a natural hill, but the collapsed and compacted wreckage of a district of immense towers that had stood in this part of London in the twenty-first century. It was known to be honeycombed with diggers' tunnels, so it seemed quite possible that Kit Solent might have stumbled across some cache of wonders beneath his own floor.
    They came to a dead end, a corridor that stopped at a large mahogany bookcase, the shelves crammed with worthless novels. Kit Solent walked straight to it, and reached up to press a stud concealed in a swag of ornamental carving. Behind the rows of books, machinery grumbled like a tetchy librarian, and the whole case slid sideways into a deep recess in the wall.
    "A secret passage," he said, looking expectantly at Fever, certain she must be excited by such a romantic thing. "Rather a cliché, I'm afraid ..."
    "Ingenious," said Fever, allowing herself to raise one eyebrow just a quarter of an inch. "Operated by a system of pulleys and counterweights, I presume."
    They stepped through the gap where the bookcase had stood and it rumbled back into place behind them while they went down ten steps into a windowless, whitewashed chamber. It had the feel of underground, that damp brown smell. There was one door, a very small one, opposite the foot of the steps. Lanterns were ranged along a stone shelf.
    Fever wondered suddenly if she were entirely safe in this strange place, with this strange man. But she could see no way now of turning back. Solent handed her a lantern, and used his tinderbox to light it before lighting another for himself. Then he opened the narrow door.
    It revealed a dark opening, a man-high passage shored with timber balks. Stale air came out at them, and along with the sound of water trickling somewhere far below, and a wet, raw-dough smell of secret places deep beneath the city.
    ***
     

     
    Chapter 7 Under London
     
    There was a tunnel beneath the house. She squeezed after Kit Solent along the narrow, wood-walled passage which looked as if he had dug it himself, and after a few yards they emerged into a much broader, older working. The prints of his boots were stamped in the damp earth underfoot, as if he had come and gone along it many times.
    "Not scared of the dark, I hope?" he asked cheerfully. "Of course not!" said Fever. What did he take her for? Another of his children? But she walked a little faster, all the same. It was very cold in the tunnel. The light from their two lanterns lit up the low brick roof and the timber buttressing which lined the walls. Before long the timber gave way to rusty metal, ribbed like the throat of a whale and slick with moisture. Not so much a tunnel as an enormous pipe.
    "This passageway was dug by Auric Godshawk, I believe," said Kit Solent. "It linked the Barbican with a house he owned outside the city. The Barbican end of it is all filled in now. Katie and I heard rumors about it years ago. Then, two summers back, there was a cave-in in one of the streets higher up the hill. A section of pavement collapsed into what people thought was