The Half-Made World (19 page)

Lowry didn’t have a high opinion of anyone from outside the Line, but his opinion of the Mayor was particularly low.

Lowry said nothing. He just stared at the blustering hick across the desk from him; he let the Mayor say it
again
: “I
said
you don’t have no jurisdiction here, Mr. Lowry. We’ve suffered enough.”

Lowry let the idiot start to say it
one more fucking time
then cut him off—leaned forward in his chair, snapped his fingers, and said: “My
bosses
think maybe your nice little town was
harboring
this villain. This man of the Gun. It’s how they think, Mr. Mayor; they are
undiscriminating
when it comes to our kind. I told them, surely this man was just passing through; surely not
Kloan
. They’re skeptical, Mr. Mayor. But perhaps if you’ll let us have a little poke around, we’ll find something to settle the issue. Don’t you think that would be best?”

The Mayor’s blue eyes twitched. He was twice Lowry’s size, and thick necked and sunburned where Lowry was round-shouldered, pale, and bespectacled; but he wilted under Lowry’s mild gray inexorable gaze.

It wasn’t anything special about Lowry that made the Mayor wilt—feeling stirrings of improper pride, Lowry was quick to remind himself of that. It was the weight that was behind Lowry; it was the weight of
destiny
that was behind him.

By small-town western-rim standards, the Mayor was an important man, with powerful friends and solemn treaties and high-stakes business dealings, and all of that would one day soon be swept aside by the annihilating weight that came rushing at Lowry’s heels. Everyone in the little room knew it.

The Mayor busied himself shuffling the letter opener around on his desk. In through the open windows came flies, and the stink of burned wood.

On the walls were mounted the heads of various mangy local beasts. Their fur frayed; they attracted the flies. Oh yeah; Lowry knew the Mayor’s type. He’d be at home on the range, huntin’ an’ fishin’, half-drunk, lordin’ his mastery over the beasts. He was not made for sitting in an office trying to
think
. But there he was, and Lowry’s orders left him no room for pity.

“Then we’ll proceed, sir, and thank you. And my superiors want me to let you know that they regret, assuming you were
not
consciously harboring this Agent of the Gun, any loss of life and property caused by our personnel in what may have been in some sense our
overzealous
enforcement of our prerogatives. We hope you’ll have no reluctance to host our men in the future. And to that end, there will of course be reparations.”

The Mayor lifted his head hopefully. “And some of our men will be here shortly to assist you in the administration of the rebuilding efforts and in the disbursement of funds.”

The hope was not quite off the Mayor’s face. By the
Line
, he was slow! “And generally to put affairs in proper order here,” Lowry added.

That
did it; the Mayor made a tiny sound like a kicked dog.

Lowry waited for the Mayor to force out a broken noise of thanks. Then he put his broad black hat on his head, gave the Mayor a curt nod, and stepped out into what was left of Kloan, after the fire.

Morningside and his men waited outside in the square. Four ranks of five, nice and proper. Kloan was warm and humid, and Morningside’s men sweated in their unsuitable black uniforms, but he did not believe in deviations from protocol. Nor did Lowry; nor did their masters.

“All well?” Morningside said.

“All well.”

“Took you long enough.”

“Sir.”

“All right, then.” Morningside turned to his men. “You men, tear this pisspot town apart. Every stitch and fiber. Every print. If that stinking jackal pissed on a tree in Kloan, I want it broken down and bagged. You know the drill. Lowry?”

“Sir?”

“Question the witnesses.”

The girl’s name—which Lowry carefully jotted down in block print in his big black ledger—was Susan. The one before that, the boy, had been sullen, hostile; before that, so-called Professor Harry Ransom had thought he was cleverer than Lowry; in both cases, it had been necessary to resort to a small show of violence. Susan was pleasingly quiet and docile. Insofar as Lowry was any judge, she was pretty, though her eyes were raw from tears and her skin was pale. Lowry made her nervous, which pleased him.

“He never spoke to you?”

“No, sir. He never did. He only smiled.”

“A big smiler, you say. A happy man.”

“Yeah . . .”

“How lucky for him. Your young man, the one who’s dead now—oh, stop that, girl—your young man spoke to him?”

“No, sir, he never did.”

“He never gave a name?”

“Who?”

“Who do you think, girl? Your stupid young man? Do I look like I’m here for him? No, the
stranger
. The
killer
. The
criminal.
”

“Sir—he wasn’t—it was like he was—”

“Like he wasn’t a human being, is that what you mean to say, girl?”

“Yes, sir—”

“Better. Faster. Stronger. More daring. Never misses a shot. Handsome, was he?”

“I guess—”

“Of course he was. Tall, was he? Afraid of nothing. Worth twenty men like me in a fight, I’ll bet. Like something out of a storybook. I bet he just smiled and your knees went weak.”

“Sir—”

“All those daring crimes. Bet he’s robbed a bank or two, but that hardly counts. Bet he’s slipped right across Line lands a dozen times, over the wire, under the fence like a fox. Bet he’s blown up a barracks or two or four or five, but that hardly counts, does it, because it’s only soldiers. Only ugly bastards like me. Right? Bet you would have run away with him if he’d so much as winked.”

“Sir, please—”

“How many men do you think he’s murdered? No, never mind that: How many women? Pretty young things like you. Probably quite a few. Statistically speaking. More than none. That doesn’t sound so romantic, does it?”

“Sir, I don’t—”

“And for what? What’s the point? They’re losing. They’re always losing. They’re the past and we’re the future. But they have to make it as painful as possible, because they’re sick and they’re mad. . . . All right, then. Never mind. Stop sniveling. Tell me what he looked like again. From the beginning.”

The girl stuttered; Lowry jotted down notes.

A male, a white male, tall, blue eyed, leather skinned; well, that could be half of them. In his fifties at least; probably then an old and hardened one. The Gun took them young, as a general rule—in so far as the Gun
had
rules—and they did not generally live long. An old one was a bad one. Gray hair in a widow’s peak; a
smiling
man. Sounded like
Rutherford;
but Rutherford had been sighted far down south, raiding supply lines, poisoning wells. One-Shot Luce? Reported dead.

Lowry sighed and flipped through the Black File, the several volumes of which lay open on the Mayor’s desk; the cold eyes of killers and rogues looked up at him from every page. He waved a hand for the girl to keep going.

John Creedmoor? Creedmoor had an eye for the ladies, they said. Oh, Creedmoor was a bad one; his file practically stank of powder and blood. But he’d been reported dead by the Sub-Conductor of the Second Army of the Harrow Cross Engine, one Mr. Gormley. Lowry made a note to telegraph Gormley for details.

“You still here, girl? Right. Did he have a scar? Like so? No?”

No scar; couldn’t be Slater, then. Dandy Fanshawe? Not if he was making eyes at the girls. Blood-and-Thunder Boch? Cantor? Red-Heeled Jack? Shit, they put one down and another two sprung up! Straight-Arrow Sussex? Thorpe, who’d brought himself to the attention of the Guns after the horrors of the Battle of Vezelay, horrors to which he, Thorpe, had been a great contributor?—but that was decades ago and Thorpe would be near eighty now, hard as walnut if he wasn’t dead. Lowry kept flipping. So many of them. Sometimes he thought the Line’s work would never be done.

“Go on, girl. Fuck off out of here. Send the next one in.”

He drafted a composite description of the killer, for circulation to all patrols and Heavier-Than-Air Vessels. Then he walked outside and leaned against a charred hitching post out front of the Mayor’s house and watched Morningside’s men work.

He had a headache. The Black File often gave him a headache. It was disordered; uncertain; full of suppositions and half truths and scraps of unverifiable almost-fact; facts that could not be put in their proper place; outright myths and stories and the most unpleasant sort of fantasies. The Agents of the Gun poisoned everything they touched, even unto the deepest recesses of the Line’s most
TOP SECRET
files.

The boardinghouse was a charred ruin. So were several surrounding buildings. Most of the walls were gone, leaving only odd-angled and crumbling beams and struts, and Lowry could see Morningside’s men at work in what had been bedrooms and bathrooms. It was eerie. Some Agents, the Black File speculated, could see through walls, which made them damnably hard to kill. . . .

Morningside’s men carried wheelbarrowfuls of wreckage out of the ruins and laid them out on the street for analysis. Scraps of furniture, brass fittings, antlers, some charred and twisted painting frames. Kloan’s residents stood by glumly at the perimeter of the activity. Professor Harry Ransom crept away down Main Street with a battered suitcase in either hand and a bloody nose, and Lowry couldn’t be bothered to stop him.

Poor old Kloan, Lowry thought; it wasn’t their fault, really. He’d exhausted his contempt on the Mayor, and now he allowed himself a moment of pity.

But what had to happen, had to happen.

He breathed deeply. He got a mouthful of ash and coughed, and it turned quickly into the bent-double coal-dust compulsive hacking of a Linesman born and bred. Some of Morningside’s men looked up, shovels in hand, and glanced with concern at the Sub-Invigilator. Lowry sent them back to work with a bad-tempered wave of his hand.

One of Morningside’s men, deep in the ruins of the boardinghouse, called out, “It’s here! I’ve found the telegraph, sir! It’s badly—”

Morningside entered the ruins, clambering over heaps of ash and fallen timbers. “Right. Let’s see. Let’s see. Any last mess—?”

He stumbled and leaned against a charred beam of wood, which toppled under his weight. Wedged in the join of the beam had been a black briefcase, which had apparently dropped during the fire through a vanished upper floor, and which now fell the remainder of the way to earth. As it fell, it clicked softly open and its contents, which were the dead Signalmen’s last weapons, tumbled out. As it happened, only one of them went off.

Moments before Sub-Invigilator (First) Morningside was wiped clean by waves of annihilating noise, Lowry had the presence of mind not only to dash for a safe clearance but also to throw his whole head into a nearby water trough, hands tight over his ears. He escaped with only a brief period of unconsciousness, from which he woke, somewhat disoriented, to learn that he had been promoted again.

CHAPTER 12