The Half-Made World (31 page)

CHAPTER 19

THE SPIRIT

Liv went to the Director’s office in the morning. She found him making notes in a journal. He put it aside, stood to greet her, and instantly resumed their conversation as if it had never been interrupted.

“I have something to show you, Doctor.” He put on a tweed jacket and folded his glasses and put them in his pocket.

“So you said. And here I am, Director.”

“Excellent. Now, you have never asked about our Guardian, I think. About our Guardian; our Spirit; our familiar; our
genius loci
. Our Egregore. Or what have you.”

“I suppose I haven’t. I think I saw enough of it.”

“You’re from the North, of course. The old world. Where reason and science are respected. Where things are made and ordered. Where men are ruled by
men
. And by women, too, of course. Such things as our Guardian must seem very strange to you. Almost barbaric, perhaps? No, no; that’s all right. Will you take my arm?”

“Of course, Director.”

“Walk with me.”

They walked into the halls of the West Wing, and downstairs.

“My father,” the Director said, “was a medical doctor by training, and a mine owner by inheritance, but an anthropologist by vocation. Like Dr. Hamsa, he studied in Jasper. He was once fortunate enough to visit your
alma mater
, Doctor, in the very far distant north; did you know that?”

She said, “I did not.”

“A beautiful place, I hear. We must talk about it sometime. One of these evenings.” He smiled at her. It occurred to her that he was unmarried, and probably lonely. However, she could see no polite way to withdraw her arm from his.

They passed through the kitchens.

He cleared his throat. “Anyway. Doctor. Have you met the Hillfolk of these parts?”

“The Folk?” She preferred not to discuss the attack on Bond’s caravan. “I suppose so. I’ve seen them working as slaves in the fields. I believe I saw some watching me from the hills as our coach passed along the roads. They are so very thin and pale and hairy; their long manes remind me of trolls from a children’s story. That fierce red paint all over their bodies.”

“The red markings are signs of seniority and wisdom. And seniority in the case of deathless reborning creatures is not to be sniffed at. . . .
Free
Hillfolk, you say? Not chained in the fields? If you saw them, then they wished to be seen. The red markings are not paint, incidentally. What they
are
is not clear. They turn to dust quickly under the microscope. I suspect a paste of mica, indigo flowers.”

They left the kitchens and passed into a maze of low-ceilinged corridors. She said, “You’ve made a study of them.”

“My father did. The proudest moment in my father’s life, after of course his visit to your country, was when he persuaded one of the Folk to allow him entry into their tunnels and he was able to inspect their paintings—I know this from his journals, in which the subject is discussed at . . . Excuse me.”

A patient had just emerged from a corridor into their path. The Director let go of Liv and held her patient’s hand very firmly between both of his and looked into her wide bruised eyes and said: “Are you well? Do tell me. Do tell me everything.”

The girl looked panicked.

“In your own time.” He patted her hand and instantly took Liv’s arm again, as if switching dance partners, and he whirled Liv away down soft blue hallways.

“The Folk were here before us, of course. Before all our border states and towns. Out here on the western edge of the world, where things are strange and not-yet-made. To them this land is sacred. To them it is the center of all things: the place where the Spirits are born in the earth, where dreams walk. Some people say that the Folk are not fully made men themselves, and that is why they do not die. If that’s so, then are they any the worse off for it? Perhaps civilization has not
reduced
them as it has us.”

“You’re a romantic, Director.”

“And you’re not, Doctor? You came a long way to be here.” He spun suddenly on his heel and withdrew a set of keys from his pocket. “My father studied their ways. Their rituals. He produced a number of monographs. He published a memoir. Through here.”

He unlocked a door and stepped through into darkness. His voice echoed back, “Their ways are more complex than perhaps you might imagine.”

He struck a match. He was standing in a short corridor ending in stairs down into the basements. He took a gas lamp from a shelf and lit its flame. “Down here.”

Liv followed him down into the tunnels.

“The truth is that they welcomed him in, Doctor. The truth is—and I would not tell this to just anyone, but I very much respect your judgment, Doctor—that he recorded that they visited him in dreams; that they crept into town; that they
called
him to this place. That they showed him what I am about to show you. It’s quite common, of course, for sufferers from schizophrenia to believe the Folk speak to them in their dreams, but I do not believe my father was mad. It does happen. They can do things we can’t. They operate according to different and in some ways looser rules.”

She remembered Mr. Bond saying,
Sometimes they bring storms.

“So. Previously it had been undiscovered. Once it was theirs. Then it became his. He had money, of course, which they did not. Did they know what would happen? He thought they did, or so he wrote. They willed it to be, and it was. But what possible purpose—?”

He suddenly passed her the lamp. “Take this. There are steep stairs here. Be careful.” He walked down ahead in the dark, as if he knew each step by heart.

When she rejoined him at the bottom of the stairs, he was smiling again.

“So. Doctor. Where were we? More to the point, where
are
we? Very nearly on the farthest western edge of creation. Out west of us, there’s Gooseneck, I suppose, then a few farms, then nothing at all that’s ever had a name. Nothing that has been
made
into one thing or the other. Unborn land. And this hospital is scarcely twenty years old, and Greenbank is little older, and before that—this too was nowhere.”

“It feels older than that. It feels as if it’s been here forever.”

“It does.” He put a hand on her shoulder, directing her down the passage.

“They say,” he said, “that if you go far enough, then the distinctions between land and water and air and fire break down, and there is a churning Sea of sorts, from which the most extraordinary things might emerge, things that make no sense in the made world, but here . . . Egregore is the technical name my father coined for such Spirits, from I believe some unpronounceable word of the Folk.” He suddenly hunched over the lamp and attempted to look menacing and wild. He barked “Ek-Ek-Kor! Kek-Rek-Gok!”

He straightened and adjusted his cravat, and gave a small smile. “Or something like that. A technical term for something that hardly admits of technicalities.”

He unlocked another door and stepped down into deeper, cooler, subbasement tunnels. The corridor ended in a heavily barred door, which the Director unlocked. On the other side, the tunnel was made of rough red rock.

“The natural caves go very deep here,” he said.

The rock beneath their feet was worn smooth. The rock of the tunnel walls was traced with red veins, the work of the Folk. It was all abstractions—whorls, spirals, sharp-edge intricacies. Complex; obsessive; beautiful. The Director moved too quickly, still talking, and she had no time to inspect them.

“My father,” he said, “was the first hairless man ever to be taken down here.”

“Hairless?”

“Yes. Ah.” He stroked his short wiry beard. “I imagine the Folk think of us as
hairless
. Stands to reason, don’t you think? Even your very long and fine hair is nothing next to the long and wild manes of the Folk. Of course, we don’t live long enough to grow such manes, do we? We die. They come back. Forever and ever. Imagine: they must see us as tiny and fractious and ignorant and hairless and naked children.”

“I have no idea, Director. Possibly.”

“Possibly? Certainly. Stands to reason. A Hillman is not an adult until he’s lain once at least in the dirt and risen again. Lacking that talent, we may never win their full admiration.”

He stopped with his hand on a door.

“My father,” he said. “They respected him. He was a strange and distant man, and he and I were not close. But this is what it says in his journals. The Folk brought him here. There were three of them. Their names, insofar as it is meaningful to name them, were Kek-Kek, Kur-Kur, and Kona-Kona. They showed him what I am about to show you, and he felt what you are about to feel. He sat down by the water and he cut his arm open from his wrist to his elbow with Kek-Kek’s stone knife. Such strength of will! A risk-taker; how could he be sure it would work? How did he know? He did not. He only believed. The Folk respected his ability to bear pain, he wrote. They respected
endurance
. They respected
will
and
belief.
And he bound the wound with his shirt and he slept there in that cave for seven days. The wound did not grow infected. The blood thickened and did not spill. In seven days, he was all but healed. Afterwards there was the most terrible scar and he never recovered full use of his fingers; but he had proved what he set out to prove. Later he came back with iron. There was no place for the Folk here anymore. It was wasted on them, he used to say. He had a vision. He built this House.”

The Director opened the door.

“My mother had been injured,” he said. “A stray bullet. The Spirit could not give her back the use of her legs, but I believe it eased her suffering. Of course, she’s dead now.”

“Oh! I’m so—”

He smiled wanly. “I would be very interested, Liv, in your opinion as to whether he acted correctly.”

“Director, I—”

“As an outsider, I mean. I really don’t know. Please don’t answer at once.”

He blew out the lamp. The cave ahead of him glowed with a warm red light.

The Director stepped aside into the shadows to let Liv pass.

The cave was womb deep and womb dark. The ground was smooth damp earth, which sloped steadily downward to a still pool, as large perhaps as the Academy’s duck pond. Tall rocks surrounded it, like women taking laundry down to the river to wash; or, Liv thought, like supplicants coming to be baptized in some very old-fashioned religion.

The water glowed with a soft red light.

The cave’s walls were painted with designs of a strangely delicate character; they hung in the misty half light like the branches of the willow trees that hung over the Academy’s river.

Self-consciously, she sat cross-legged on the floor.

The light emerged from
below
the surface of the water—like, Liv thought, when one held one’s hand in front of a candle, and the light passed warmly through it.

“The light is very beautiful,” she said.

She felt a little flushed, and she fanned herself with her sleeve. The cave was oddly warm.

“Director Howell?” She turned around, and was surprised to find that he was no longer visible. The cave was larger than she’d realized, and its depths were in shadow, from which the red markings glittered like stars.

She turned back. Something immense and invisible rose from the water and held her in warm arms and she cried out. There was a smell of earth, blood, tears. It surrounded her, and she could see nothing. It forced its way hungrily inside, probing, reaching. It found, near the surface, a knot of humiliation over her failures with her patients D and G, and a vein of misery and loneliness and resentment of the House staff’s general coldness to her. She gasped as those things were brought into the light. It took them from her and lapped them up and she sighed with relief. Her nerve tonic, in all the years she’d been taking it, which suddenly seemed a simply
absurdly
long time, had never been so swift, so powerful, so
determined
.

It found and quickly devoured a nightmare concerning the Line’s Heavier-Than-Air Vessel and its hideous insectile gun. It remained unsatisfied. It probed deeper, looking for deeper wounds. . . .

CHAPTER 20

THE WOUND

~ 1871 ~

The front the August Hall of the Academy of Koenigswald presented to the outside world was dignified, imposing, severe—a closed face of gray stone. At its rear, its square form collapsed slowly into a chaos of arched buttresses, exposed plumbing, conservatories, shadowed verandahs and cloisters, experimental greenhouses, a surprising profusion of gargoyles, a cluster of tool sheds where pale students might at any time be found smoking—though not today—a pen for Dr. Bey’s goats, and down to gently sloping lawns.

The lawns were rolled and tended by old men in bowler hats, each of whom Liv knew by name, each of whom she greeted on her way outside with a
Good morning, Mr. ———
, just as she did every morning. One by one, the old men smiled and took off their caps to her.